Why does Unity set imported mesh/animation scale to 0.01?

Whenever a mesh or animation is imported into Unity the "Scale Factor" is set to 0.01 by default. Why?

Wouldn't it make more sense to set the scale to 1.0 and let ME decide how things are scaled?

Should we be building our assets in Maya at 100 times their expected scale?

This has been answered before at Import Settings. Well, it's been addressed anyway - no-one seems to know why it's like that...

However, you can set the Scale to 1.0, and do your Maya models however you want. It's just per-model, no way to change it permanently.

It's not like that for all apps. For example, everything from Blender comes in at 1.0 by default (unless you manually export to .fbx). Which is nice for me since I use Blender, but I think there should be a global default that would apply to all models.

Unity uses different Scale factor when importing from different files (fbx, 3ds, mb, and so on). I believe it's implemented this way to compensate differences between 3d modelling tools. We probably would implement in a different way next time:) but we keep it for backwards-compatibility for now...

I want to add my 2 cent on this. Maybe I am wrong but I think it was done thinking of 1cm as the usual modeling scale. This is good for animated meshes but not for prefabs for levels. And usually prefabs are MANY MORE than animated meshes, so it would make more sense to use a 1:1 scale. Also, it would be nice to have a preferences setting about this thing also on per-project preferences maybe on Unity3. Preferences panels should be enhanced a lot IMHO.

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/4757/import-settings - worked perfectly for me and no more .01 scaling on import. Btw, I also set all units (Unit Scale) to Meters in Max, and UNCHECKED "Respect System Units in Files" in Units Setup->System Unit Setup.

It’s also strange that the same file exported as FBX will default to 0.01 and as a maya file it imports as 1.0.

My experience is that for making games, the default Maya setting (centimeters or meters) is ignored by most third party tools and 1 unit always equals 1 meter. This is most relevant to physics stuff.,

Unity’s Scale Factor changes based on the file type being imported. For instance, the default scale factor for an imported fbx is .01 while the scale factor for a .mb is 1. To achieve the best 1:1 workflow without having to mess with the scale factor at all, do either of the following:

  1. Use Maya default centimeter scene size and import the .mb files into Unity.
  2. Change Maya scene size to meter and export .fbx to bring into Unity.

Here’s a quick image I put together comparing the scale factors between these file types:
20652-unityscale.png

Maya is my only 3D package I use so I can’t speak to the scale differences with other packages. I hope this helps!

if exporting FBX from maya - there’s a units option in the advanced option. Change this to meters instead.