Art Asset Best-Practice Guide

Unity supports textured 3D models from a variety of programs or sources. This short guide has been put together by games artists with developers at Unity, to help you create assets that work better and more efficiently in your Unity project.

Scale & Units

Files & Objects

Sensibly named objects help you find things quickly

Mesh

Stairway to framerate heaven

The method you use to construct objects can have a massive affect on the number of polygons, especially when not optimised. In this digram the same shape mesh has 156 triangles on the right and 726 on the left. 726 may not sound like a great deal of polygons, but if this is used 40 times in a level, you will really start to see the savings. A good rule of thumb is often to start simple and add detail where needed. It's always easier to add polygon than take them away.

Textures

If you author your textures to a power of two (e.g. 512×512 or 256×1024), the textures will be more efficient and won't need rescaling at build time. You can use up to 4096x4096 pixels, (although 2048x2048 is the highest available on many graphics cards/platforms). Search online for expert advice on creating good textures, but some of these guidelines can help you get the most efficient results from your project:

One texture (left) vs three textures (right)

Tiling textures ftw

Do you need ALL those windows?

Materials

Import/Export

Unity can use two types of files: Saved 3D application files and Exported 3D formats. Which you decide to use can be quite important:

Saved application files

Unity can import, through conversion: Max, Maya, Blender, Cinema4D, Modo, Lightwave & cheetah3D files, e.g. .MAX, .MB, .MA etc. see more in Importing Objects.

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

Exported 3D formats

Unity can also read FBX, OBJ, 3DS, DAE & DXF files. For a general export guide you can refer to this section this section

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

Page last updated: 2012-11-16