make assets from blender to unity process

Dear all,

I am very new in unity and also blender. Currently I am learning both of them. I know that I can create my own assets with blender, export them as fbx, then and import them to unity.

However, I saw a lot of game assets from assets store has LOD0, LOD1, LOD2, so it means one object has three meshes with a different number of polys. I learned from several udemy tutorial, but none of them taught me that I should do this step. So the question is, is it necessary to make three meshes for one object? Is there a unity plugin or blender plugin can do this automatically for me?

 

Not in the sense that the object wouldn't be usable in Unity otherwise, but LODs are recommended for objects that are seen from close up as well as from a distance. Reason is that the number of Polygons you can render is limited because they put load on the GPU. Therefore objects in a distance are switched or faded to lower LOD (Level Of Detail) variants to reduce the load and keep high FPS.
If you search specifically for creating LODs, you will find instructions. That can be done automatically or only requiring small corrections.

 

Hi Dragon Coder, thanks very much for the answer! But caan you give me some further links or information about how to do it automatically? Currently, I only found this youtube tutorial for blender, but it looks not totally automatically. If you have a lot of small self made assets, then it will be a lot of work...

The reason I want to do that is because my computer don't have a good graphic card. So I think, maybe it is a good choice for me to begin the game dev journey in the first step.

 

It's not a fully automatic process, at least not if you care for quality. Search for "autolod" or "automatic lod", some tools exist including Blender's "decimate" feature I believe.

If your main concern is a slow computer then I'd recommend to make low-poly art. You hardly need LOD for that or at best only levels 0 and 1. Given that you're also just learning, doing LODs is just going to be a time sink where you don't really learn much from. Just use that mesh as is without LODs and worry about that later.

 

HI Code Smile, thanks for the answer! The automatic lod is c.a. 90 euro, a little expensive for me, but the autoload is totally free, thanks so much! But I think, your suggestion for low poly art is more practical.

 

Use blender's decimate feature, and take a look at Amplify Imposters asset.

 

Google "LOD".

More than you can read in a lifetime is already written.

 

Wow thanks! This plugin looks great! Somehow it uses billboard techniques to make the number of polygons became extremely low and also the qualities doesn't change a lot!

I have already put them in my wishlist and wait for big discount.