Texturing in Blender vs Unity

Support Materials and Textures
1

Let me preface this by first saying this question is mainly aimed at people that have experience in both Blender and Unity.

I have started working on a project to create my first video game. I am using Blender to do the modeling and Unity to build the game and publish it. My technique for doing my textures so far is very simplistic. In fact, I basically color each individual part of my models a solid color. I am doing this to try to keep development time down, but it also creates a low-risk way of giving definition to rendered models; I can easily go back and do higher quality textures without huge loss of time.

So my question is this; what are the pros and cons of doing textures in Blender vs Unity and vice versa. Being in a Blender forum, I am guessing I will see most people preferring Blender. Because my purpose is to import my models into Unity for a game, I feel like it might make more sense to just do the textures in Unity. For example, I want to add lights to some of my models, but you cannot import (usable) lights (or cameras) into Unity from Blender. So I will need to do at least that in Unity, so why not just do it all in Unity? From what I understand, Unity will only see baked textures, so I cannot do any procedural textures in Blender. I am planning on using some procedural textures for at least the lights I mentioned. Sorry if this is long-winded, but I just want to do some research before I get too far along in the modeling process. As I said, my technique is very basic, so I will keep doing that until I figure out how I will ultimately do all of my textures.

Thanks for your time!

2

I think you should be a bit more exact here, what do you mean by “creating textures” ? Are you actually using UV unwrapping and image textures to define the looks of the surface, or just applying a basic diffuse material in Unity? Creating materials and creating textures can mean two quite different things. I suppose you mean materials, because Unity itself doesn’t have tools to actually create textures unless you are using some kind of third-party editor tool to create them inside Unity.

Aside from that, I sometimes like to apply a placeholder materials in Blender, just to help me keep track of where each material should go. I’d then export the model to Unity, create materials using the built-in tools (also importing image textures, if any) and replace the placeholder ones. If my textures needed tweaking, I’d just edit the textures and re-import only them instead of the whole model all again.

As for the procedural textures, you are right, Unity won’t recognize them as Blender has a completely different material system. You can bake them into a texture though and use that in Unity.