Blender Models to Unity Engine

This tutorial is going to teach you how to use the 3D modeling program Blender and how to export your creations into the Unity game engine.

Supplies

Blender 2.8

Unity Engine

Step 1: Downloading Blender and Unity

To download blender all you have to do is go to their website https://www.blender.org/

Once there you should see a blue bar that says Download Blender 2.8X.

Click that and it will bring you to another page where you can download blender.

To download Unity, go to https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download and click download Unity Hub

Run that file once downloaded. Create an account for Unity. Once logged in, click the gear icon next to your profile and select manual activation. Click "save license request" and then select the link underneath that. Upload the file you just downloaded and click next. For the license select personal edition and "I don't use Unity in a professional capacity." Click next. Download the license file and back in the Unity hub upload that file.

Now that you have a license for Unity its time to download an engine.

Installs > add > select which year (I choose 2019) > next

Step 2: Opening Blender

Run the installer for blender and then open Blender with the shortcut icon.

Blender is an open source 3d modeling program which is capable of creating almost everything imaginable. For that to happen we first need to turn on some add-ons within Blender.

Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > enable these two add-ons: Import Images as Planes & LoopTools

Now you are ready to start creating.

Step 3: Set Up for Modeling

First things first, reference images always.

Go onto your preference of image searching platforms and find a nice side of your weapon of choice, I will be using a knife as example.

Movement in blender :

shift + middle mouse : panning

middle mouse : rotating/revolving

scrolling : zooming in/out

Click and drag to select everything in the scene or press 'a' to select all objects. Right click and select delete at the bottom.

Press shift+a to bring up the add menu, select image as plane - navigate to your image

You should see a gray box, this is due to the viewport display, images do not show up unless you are in LookDev (Viewport shading) mode.

Rotate the object if needed to make modeling easy.

Short-cuts used

shift + A : add menu

x : delete menu

a : select all

Step 4: Creating Objects

Now that we have set up the reference image it's time to start modeling.

Currently blender is in Object mode which allows us to move/scale/rotate objects. To edit objects on the vertex level we need to be in edit mode. You can switch between these modes by pressing 'tab' or by going in the upper left corner and using the drop down box.

A basic rule for modeling is to start with the primitive that is closest to the end result. Since I am trying to create a knife, I will be using cylinders and cubes. Another rule of thumb for 3d modeling is that you do not have to create the entire object as one object. If in the real world they are separate parts, make them separate.

*my units are in inches but the default is meters so measurements may very

shortcuts used

g : grab/move/translate

g+g : edge slide (keeps geometry the same while only moving vertices)

r : rotate

s : scale

crtl + r : edge loops

* You can limit which axis are affected by these commands

i : inset (creates new geometry within a face based on the face)

Step 5: Finishing Up the Knife

Now that the handle is finished we are going to create the blade and the hilt as two separate objects.

The hilt is easy as we can borrow the geometry from the handle to get a rough estimate of its size. We select the handles one face and press shift + d to duplicate the geometry and then by pressing p, we are able to separate this mesh into its own object. Lastly we just need to extrude out the face and then scale it to the right size.

For the blade I choose to start with a cube since the blade is close to a rectangle. After scaling the width of the blade I add 1 edge loop to be the edge of the blade. From top view I drag out the blade's tip to the right spot constrained to the y axis. Once more edge loops are added and scaled to their right spots I merge the tip into one vertex with alt + m.

shortcuts used :

e : extrude

shift + d : duplicate geometry

p : separate menu

alt + m : merge menu

Step 6: Exporting As .fbx

Last step in blender is to export to a fbxfile.

delete your reference image first

File > export > .fbx

Now to import this file into Unity

I encourage you to create a few other objects and a simple environment maybe if you got the time.

Step 7: Importing to Unity

Create a new project in Unity

Select 3D

Once it loads in you are able to drag in your .fbx file into the assets manager

Once your file is there, you can then drag it into the scene for later use.

Congratulations you have completed this Instructable. Thank you for following along.