need help?

Hello all, first post here. I've done a few tutorials and made a few small things. One thing that really slows me down in design is I have no real fundamental understanding of how I should be thinking about units and scaling in order to get things to look and feel right. I get that the units are unitless but by default can be treated as if they are meters because of the default gravity settings. However, when I import something and it says a scale of 1 and I want it to be 10 units tall, I don't know how to achieve that. Is there any way to see/set the absolute size of an object? Thanks!

 

No, basically there isn't. What I do in situations like that is create my own scale bar: add a Cube to the scene (which by default is 1 meter on a side), then scale it in (say) Y until it's as high as I want my model to be. Then I just stick it next to my model, and scale the model (or adjust the scale in its import settings) until it looks about right.

P.S. And no, I don't need any help. A better title for this thread would be something like "How to judge the size of an imported model?" Using good thread titles will often get you better help.

 

1 unit to 1 meter is the intended scale, but don't get caught up with that like it is a hard and fast rule. In fact, many games it would be impractical to use 1 unit to 1 meter.

What is generally more important is relative scale to other objects in your game. Making an object about the same size, as another object, about half size, 3X as tall, etc.

Some things in your game you may intentionally have at different scales, making units to meters meaningless.

My game is an example of that, where I have ships that are approximately 1 unit to 1 meter. But the cannonballs they fire look like little BB's at realistic scales, so I make them about 10X the actual size so they are easy to see. The crates of items they drop would be difficult to see at actual size, so I make them comparatively like the size of a house even though they still look like a small box bobbing in the water. I use real world terrain though, but players would get frustrated if the ship sailed at realistic speeds over realistic distances (who would want to spend all afternoon watching their ship sail from London to Calais?), so the ships sail approximately 20X as fast in units as in reality, and I've scaled down the game world to about 1/7 actual size. Units to meters doesn't actually mean anything here.

Most games will have similar odd sounding scaling for visibility or playability.