Unity for Blender users

I'm a long time Blender user on Linux. I'm trying out Unity for the first time thanks to the new Linux port.
Are there any tips/tricks/settings that make Unity easier for a Blender user?
Things like Y up world space and different mouse/keyboard commands to navigate the 3d space are the most obvious things I would like to switch to match Blender, but any suggestions are welcome.

 

Hey! I'm using Blender with Unity for 2 years now and here are some tips:

Design

- The object count is more important than the vertices/face count. You can build entire levels in blender and then export to unity, but make sure to join (ctrl+j) objects that contain a lot of single detail objects.
- Unity will import your materials, so you can safely create them in blender
- Create your animations in blender, make sure to set them to False User and you can use them in Unity (works like a charm)

Usage

- I think there are no options to configure the unity camera movement. You'll have learn the Unity commands and the blender commands, sorry. ^^ But it's not that bad.
- same with Y up world space, but it should be easy to change the up vector in Blender, but you don't have to, because:

- Always create your Assets in .blend files and if you want to use them in Unity, export them to Unity as .fbx files. That way you can kick out cameras, lights and armatures in the export dialogue and (if you can) set the export to ASCII Binary instead of Binary ASCII format, that way files will be much smaller and Unity will import them way, way faster (you'll need a newer version of blender for that, I think they added Binary with 2.71 or so)
+ Exporting them to .fbx files will set -Z Forward and Y Up! So don't worry anymore about this difference.

That's it for now, maybe there's something else coming to my mind after lunch.

 

Hi there!,
You may try "Blenderizer". A good editor extension for Blender lovers!

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/18546


Also there is this nice script for making exports easier but I haven't used that for a while and don't know if it still works.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?343100-Addon-Unity-Simple-Export

 

I'm guessing you reversed ASCII and binary - since binary would be smaller, faster, and was added in 2.71?

Also of note, if you drop the .blend anywhere in your Assets folder and Unity will automatically import the .blend as an .fbx. Odd Redesign's suggestions are probably for finer control over the export.

 

Aah, yes! You're right. Had a long break from making levels instead of coding, so I totally reversed these two. Binary is the faster and smaller one.

If you export the fbx yourselves you have more control and unity doesn't have to generate the fbx files when generating metadata, so that's some time you save when someone clones your repository and opens the project for the first time (or whenever you add a new version of a file)

Thanks for pointing this out, I checked again and it's definitely binary.