While I was working on a Unity project, I tried to save a Blender model directly into the assets folder in the proper format (.blend). But it was not displaying properly. Apparently, only the official version of Blender will work with Unity, not the Steam version. Based on this information and the fact that I have the Steam version of Blender, I ended up saving the model as an FBX file, somehow effectively working around this problem. Has anyone else ever faced this problem when attempting to use the Steam version of Blender in conjunction with Unity? If so, have you found solutions to this besides saving their Blender models as FBX files?
The first thing you should try is to:
- Not have the Steam version
- Install the official version from blender.org, using the installer, and have it associate .blend files with that installation
In my recollection, the association is required for Unity to find the Blender installation and have the import process work automatically.
Under the hood, Unity detects the file and locates through the OS the program associated with the .blend file type, basically getting whichever version of Blender you have installed and associated. After that, it runs a python script to tell Blender to export as FBX ascii 6.1 with defaults designed for Unity (you can actually find the script and change it to use the binary FBX if you want). Any issues you find is due to this process.
Best of luck!