Today, we have imported a Lego Crash Dummy into Unity and placed it into our environment. We are using this Lego figure to test the physics of our game for the current build of this game by having the Lego figure walk around the environment and how lighting would look in first-person view. So far, we have been successful, however, we ran into an issue such that whenever we move the Lego figure too close to the wall, the Lego figure would simply fall off and the game would have to be reset. But when investigated the root of the problem, we discovered that the floor had been given a solid surface as well as collision detection. Unfortunately, the walls were not given such properties until we tinkered with the physics engine once more. At the time of this writing, we have alleviated the problem of the walk-through walls and are now working on the lighting portion and implementing enemy character models.
We have done some research into the ways that we can re-import Blender files once they have been exported into Unity. Unfortunately, after searching on the web as well as tinkering with both Blender and Unity, we have been unable to find an easy or clear cut solution to the matter. However, over the course of our troubleshooting, we have uncovered that once the exported Blender file has been modified in Unity, even if you save the Blender file in Unity, you can manually move the modified file back into Blender.
There have been some issues with this method. First off, as discussed in a previous post, once Unity saves a file in order to continue work in that program, it saves the file in a .unitypackage file. This is a file format that is native to Unity and unfortunately, Blender does not recognize this file type. In addition, the only we have been able to make this solution work is to change some user preferences from Unity so that it does not automatically conform to this setting for every file. For example, our game uses a lot of different assets such as walls, characters models and evens sounds, and Unity has to consider all of these individual assets when saving a file imported from Blender. So it seems to us that the bigger the file, the more assets are present, which also means we may not be able to bring our game that we have modified in Unity back into Blender. Fortunately, we can still somehow move smaller objects like a simple cube or sphere back into Blender, albeit with a little finagling.
