I've been working on a pipeline that lets me use Unity and Blender for what each does best without having to constantly rebuild the same environment in both programs.

Most of the actual level construction happens in Unity. Walls, floors, rooms, architectural elements, and whatever props are necessary to establish the space are built directly in the game.

Once the environment is in a good enough state, I export the entire scene from Unity as an FBX and bring it into Blender.

That gives me a 1:1 representation of the game environment inside Blender, which means I can stage characters, animations, cameras, and other elements directly against the actual game space.

It's been a huge improvement over trying to recreate the environment by eye.

Instead of thinking, "I think this wall is about here," I can just import the wall.

That takes a surprising amount of guesswork out of blocking shots and camera movement. It also gives me a much better starting point for lighting and staging because I'm working against the same proportions and spatial relationships that will eventually exist in the game.

Of course, there was a fairly significant catch.

I had built my characters at one scale.

I had built my environments at another scale.

Neither scale was particularly intentional.

They were both just... the scales that happened to work at the time.

This became a problem once I started trying to use the two together more seriously. A character that looked perfectly reasonable on its own could suddenly feel enormous against the environment. Camera distances were off. Proportions didn't quite make sense. Things that should have been simple became a constant exercise in compensating for arbitrary numbers.

So I spent a rather unhealthy number of hours going back through everything and getting the scales properly established.

Once it was done, everything lined up beautifully.

And now I have a rule that I'm probably going to carry into every project from here on out:

Decide what scale means before building half the project.

It seems obvious in retrospect.

That's usually how these lessons work.