Resolved Importing assets - Good workflow and maintainability.

Hello, I'm looking for advice to improve my current asset importing workflow in a way that will keep things maintainable as the project continues to increase in size. Current what I am doing is that I have a scene in Blender in a collection and I export the entire collection to unity. Then I separate the objects from the import file as prefabs. The reason I decided to do things like this is because it helps when modeling the assets to be able to scale the asset to the environment so that it fits better. I'm sure that this is an uncommon method of importing assets because I don't see anyone else doing it, but I find that this in a way makes things both easier and at the same time a little more confusing at times. So in general I would just like to get some advice from someone that is experienced in working on continued projects, to understand is it bad to export entire scenes and what would be a better more maintainable method?

 

Hey, if it works for you, it works for you!

Only the meshes in the fbx file that you actually reference are going to be included in the final build, so there shouldn't be any problems with regards to that.

We have done what you're talking about when building eg. tilesets for a 3D world. It was very convenient, both for the modeler and for the level builders to have all of the meshes inside the same file.

In a team setting, we have stopped using .blend files in the project, as they're quite slow to import. Having entire scenes would probably make that a lot worse. If you get a new team member on the project, and you have large .blend files (especially when they have animations), the first import is going to take forever. It also requires them to have the same Blender version installed as the animator.

I don't think your approach will work very well with animations, since those usually are relative to the root of the file when imported in Unity (so it'll try to animate your entire scene instead of just one character), but you can have different workflows for different objects.

 

Awesome thanks, It's nice to know that it is not a ridiculous thing that I have been doing, I appreciate your feedback. Also your right about not having all the animations in one scene, I initially tried that but realized very quickly that all my animated objects needed to be separated but everything else is kept together