Importing Objects From Maya

Unity natively imports Maya files. To get started, simply place your .mb or .ma file in your project's Assets folder. When you switch back into Unity, the scene is imported automatically and will show up in the Project view.

To see your model in Unity, simply drag it from the Project View into the Scene View or Hierarchy View.

Unity currently imports from Maya:

All nodes with position, rotation and scale. Pivot points and Names are also imported.
Meshes with vertex colors, normals and up to 2 UV sets.
Materials with Texture and diffuse color. Multiple materials per mesh.
Animations FK & IK
Bone-based animations

Unity does not import blend shapes. Use Bone-based animations instead. Unity automatically triangulates polygonal meshes when importing, thus there is no need to do this manually in Maya.

If you are using IK to animate characters you have to select the imported .mb file in Project View and choose Bake IK & Simulation in the Import Settings dialog in the Inspector.

Requirements

In order to import Maya .mb and .ma files, you need to have Maya installed on the machine you are using Unity to import the .mb/.ma file. Maya 8.0 and up is supported.

If you don't have Maya installed on your machine but want to import a Maya file from another machine, you can export to fbx format, which Unity imports natively. Please Install ->2011.3 for best results. To export see HOWTO_exportFBX.

Once exported Place the fbx file in the Unity project folder. Unity will now automatically import the fbx file. Check the FBX import setting in the inspector as mentioned in HOWTO_exportFBX

Behind the import process (Advanced)

When Unity imports a Maya file it will launch Maya in the background. Unity then communicates with Maya to convert the .mb file into a format Unity can read. The first time you import a Maya file in Unity, Maya has to launch in a command line process, this can take around 20 seconds, but subsequent imports will be very quick.

Troubleshooting

Keep your scene simple, try and work with a file which only contains the objects you need in Unity
If your meshes cause problems, make sure you have converted any patches, nurbs surface etc into Polygons (Modify > Convert + also Mesh > Quadragulate/Triangulate) Unity only support Polygons.
Maya in some rare cases messes up the node history, which sometimes results in models not exporting correctly. Fortunately you can very easily fix this by selecting Edit->Delete by Type->Non-Deformer History.
Unity likes to keep up with the latest FBX where possible so if you have any issues with importing some models, check Autodesk latest version, or for fail-safe install 2011.3
Animation baking in Maya is now done with FBX instead of natively, which allows for more complex animations to be baked properly to FBX format. If you are using driven keys, then make sure to set at least one key on your drivers for the animation to bake properly

Page last updated: 2012-01-31