Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I want Blender and Unity to be like chocolate and peanut butter.

I have a very simple, possible naive use case (I'm bad at designing stuff and don't know much about that "world") that I struggled with last time I tried Unity. I imported from a variety of formats/tools...so maybe there's an easy way of doing this with Blender/Unity that I'm not aware of.

I want to create a model of some real world item (say a simple 2mx2m block for arguments sake) using the exact sizes of the object. Then I want to import it in Unity and have the size stay correct. Iirc one base unit in Unity is 1mx1m so if I make a 2mx2m block I'd like it to be imported and displayed as 2 unity units...for some reason the conversions lead to all sorts of bizzaro size adjustments. Must be a Unity thing but that was a rather frustrating experience.

It'd be easier if unity weren't proprietary.

Do you have anything to back that up? I don't think you do. Unity has a public API and so does Blender.

I'm all for OSS just like the next guy, but saying it would be easier if unity weren't propriety is just FUD.

Not FUD. Backup: take a look at the number of outside contributors in Unreal engine release notes for each release. Its not FOSS, but still commercial licensed visible source. People can find and fix the bugs they encounter. Then take a look at commercial middleware vendors that can integrate with Unreal on their own, without having to involve Epic. Take a look at the list of companies committing development time to Blender because the see their effort improving the ecosystem instead of just adding to Unity own IP.

Also take a look at the ancient .NET integration in Unity that has been strangled by licensing problems with Xamarin. Even though Microsoft has re-licensed .NET recently, it doesn't look like Unity will have an upgrade anytime soon. The only development environment for Unity is C#. Look at the numerous VMs and language integration in Unreal, in addition to any language that links with C++.

Answering your own questions is obnoxious. Public API documentation for software only available behind a commercial subscription is completely irrelevant when integrating with open source.

Wow people really do like throwing the term FUD around when it's completely non-applicable around here.

In theory Blender being open should be enough.

I've written custom importers for Unity and it's a fairly straight forward process as long as the format you want to export to a format Unity likes from has an exporter you can call from the command line.

You just maintain some metadata on what hasn't been imported yet and use the asset import hooks to activate your conversion to a format that Unity already knows (usually FBX for 3D).

But honestly I wasn't aware that Unity doesn't already have reasonable Blender integration. I've been using Unity + Blender for years and never had too many issues.

It's been broken between Blender versions before because it does exactly what I describe (fires up instances of Blender with a python script that converts to FBX), but you can edit the script that Unity uses to convert and apply fixes which usually get shared pretty quickly.

There's also a little weirdness with the differences in coordinate space, but it just takes some mindfulness on the Blender side of things to deal with.

I don't know how much better the integration could get without going a step further and actually generating the FBX data from outside of Blender, but you can already do that with the same asset import hooks I mentioned before

Reply on news.ycombinator.com