Asset Importing
Unity's Asset Pipeline is Unmatched.
All major tools and file formats are supported, any art application can be used with Unity.
All assets in a Unity Project are automatically and immediately imported upon save, whether they are 3D models, animations, textures, scripts, or sounds. Update your assets at any moment, even while playing your game inside the Editor.
Automatic & Instantaneous Importing
When any asset file is saved, it is without exception seamlessly imported. Each asset's Import Settings are stored, so you can set them once and never worry again.
Incredible 3D Package Support
Unity can import 3D models, bones, and animations from almost any 3D application. See the bottom of this page for details.
Just Hit Save
Hit Save in Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Cheetah3D or Blender, and Unity will pick up the changes across your entire project. It's that simple. See the bottom of this page for a full list of supported formats.
Scriptable Pipeline
Unity let's you post-process incoming assets through C#, so you can extend our just-hit-save importing in whatever way your projects require.
TrueType Font Support
Unity handles pixel-perfect rendering of Unicode TrueType fonts. Drop in any TTF font and start making great-looking text. When localization time rolls around Unicode strings are supported as well as IME input.
Height-map to Normal-map Conversion
Any texture can be converted into a Normal-map. This process is automatic and instantaneous, even when you later change your image files.
High-Quality Mipmap Generation
Unity supports several different mipmap generation methods: Detail Fade, Kaiser Filters, Gamma Correction.
Texture Handling
Save your multi-layer Photoshop files normally and let Unity automatically compress your images with high quality compression. It's all automatic without a single required click. Unity 3 introduces 5 different presets to let you quickly set up your textures. You can override size and compression settings per-platform so you can keep one source file for all your deployment pages.
Audio Support
Unity can import any audio format that is supported by FMOD. Audio can be internally converted and distributed as Ogg Vorbis, for keeping down your game's published file size.
Substances
Unity's native support for Allegorithmic Substances means that you can load Substance files straight into your project and tweak and adjust their parameters right inside of the Unity Editor.
Looking to extend your Substance-related workflow with Asset post-processing? The Substance Importer Class gives you direct access the imported Procedural Material instances so that they can be modified by Unity's fully-scriptable asset pipeline.
3D Package Support
| Meshes | Textures | Anims | Bones | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maya .mb & .ma1 | ||||
| 3D Studio Max .max1 | ||||
| Cheetah 3D .jas1 | ||||
| Cinema 4D .c4d1 3 | ||||
| Blender .blend1 | ||||
| modo .lxo2 | ||||
| Autodesk FBX | ||||
| COLLADA | ||||
| Carrara1 | ||||
| Lightwave1 | ||||
| XSI 5.x1 | ||||
| SketchUp Pro1 | ||||
| Wings 3D1 | ||||
| 3D Studio .3ds | ||||
| Wavefront .obj | ||||
| Drawing Interchange Files .dxf |
1 Import uses the application's FBX exporter. Unity then reads the FBX file.
2 Import uses the application's COLLADA exporter. Unity then reads the COLLADA file.
3 Cinema4D 10 has a buggy FBX exporter. Please see here for workarounds.
Image Formats
- Photoshop .psd and .tiff are imported with layers automatically flattened.
- JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TGA, IFF, PICT and many other image formats are supported.
Supported Audio & Video Formats
- MP3 and Ogg Vorbis .ogg audio files are natively supported, depending on platform. On mobile platforms, audio is converted to MP3 to take full use of hardware decompression.
- AIFF, WAV and most other audio format are supported, ideally suited for sound effects. Optional compression can be configured in the Unity Editor.
- MOD, IT, S3M, XM tracker files are fully supported.
- Ogg Theora video is natively supported.
- Video MOV, AVI, ASF, MPG, MPEG, MP4VIDEO files are transcoded by Unity with a configurable bitrate.
Other File Formats
- XML and text files with .xml and .txt extensions can be referenced at runtime.
- Any other file types, such as RTF and DOC, can be used for project notes and to-do lists.