Absolute size of an object in the editor, and size of imported things

Hi all. This seems like a simple issue but i couldn’t figure out how to do it, and the search is saturated with script results.

How can i find out, within the editor, the size of an object in whatever units unity uses?

I’m looking at an object, which is an instance of a prefab, and it lists Scale as 1,1,1. But it says that’s relative, so i don’t really have much frame of reference for it. (it has no parent, besides the world.) I tried clicking the Select button in the prefab sectrion at the top, but it doesn’t show any new information in terms of size. this object is the premade keycard model from the unity stealth tutorial

for testing purposes i tried using blender to create a cube with dimensions of 1,1,1,applied rotation and scale, exported it with a scale of 1, and imported it into unity. Then placed it next to the keycard, This was the result:

alt text

My cube is visible in the image just infront of the black part on the upperRight of the keycard. It’s a little grey speck.
That cube is, to all of my possible knowledge, actually 1 unit on all dimensions. which means the keycard definitely can’t be.

I’m very confused by this
Can someone please explain ?

The reason that the cube is really small is that it has had it’s import size set to 0.01 in the import settings. That happens automatically for all blender objects, don’t ask me why. Select the import, and change the Scale Factor under Model from .01 to 1.

To get the size of objects in scripts, you check the bounds of the Mesh, or the bounds of the Renderer. As far as I’m aware, there’s no way to check the size in the inspector. If you want that, you need to write an editor script that exposes those values to you.

A fair warning; if you have an object that’s not a kind of square or ball or any other even shape, the bounds will not give you a very good representation of the thing’s size, but then again the size of such an object is a very vaguely defined concept. If I ask you what the size of a tree is, how do you answer that? Height? Weight? Unity gives you a box the tree exactly fits into, which is as good an answer as any.

The default units are 1m per unit, however this does not apply to models made in a 3d package unless you make them to the same scale, blender has the option to work in metric units, using this scale you can work it out.