Is there a way to change which direction axes point towards?

[GHMP]

I’m trying to animate for Unity3D with Blender, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out how to translate Blender movement into Unity movement, because Blender’s axes are different. Z goes up/down and Y goes forward/back, or maybe Y goes back/forward - I really can’t tell, but it’s not the same as it is in Unity. For some reason, the Front view shows the Y axis pointing away from the camera. If I’m looking at the front of something, shouldn’t the forward axis point at the camera…?

Is there a way to just manually set which direction the axes point towards, and have it export those directions properly as an FBX? That way, I won’t have to say “okay, I want to move this object 2 units to the right…now is that positive X, or negative X…? oh wait, was it even the X axis anymore, or did the X axis change to the Y axis?”

I’d prefer it if I could just set the forward axis to be positive Z, the backwards axis to be negative Z, the upward axis to be positive Y, and so on, that way everything in Blender would be the same as it is in Unity. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

Hopefully this is the proper section for a question like this. I know I mentioned animation, but I figured the actual “fixing the problem” part would be done with the interface somehow.

[Richard_Marklew]

You cannot change the orientation. There is no correct orientation of axes, different software use different methods.
Aren’t the fbx export settings working for you to change the orientation on export ?

[Sackadoo (fastload64)]

Is there a way to just manually set which direction the axes point towards, and have it export those directions properly as an FBX? That way, I won’t have to say “okay, I want to move this object 2 units to the right…now is that positive X, or negative X…? oh wait, was it even the X axis anymore, or did the X axis change to the Y axis?”

I’d prefer it if I could just set the forward axis to be positive Z, the backwards axis to be negative Z, the upward axis to be positive Y, and so on, that way everything in Blender would be the same as it is in Unity. Is there a way to do this?

You’re right; it’s confusing. Blender isn’t the only 3D application using Z-up instead of Y-up, but if you’re used to Y-up, it takes some adaptation.

The best way to deal with this is to build whatever you’re planning to export, then select it all and rotate it 90 degrees around the X-axis which will orient your object(s) with its local Z-axis pointing toward the front. Then export and it should come into Unity (or Maya or Messiah) the way you expect.