Prepare the scene before you export

A raw BlenderGIS scene is too dense and too messy to export directly. Run through this prep first, on every object you plan to export:

1. Apply modifiers and transforms. BlenderGIS terrain arrives as a plane with Subdivision and Displace modifiers. Apply them so the mesh is real geometry, then select everything and press Ctrl+A > All Transforms. Exporting with unapplied transforms is the single most common source of wrong scale in engines.
2. Reduce the polycount. Raw DEM triangulations run into the hundreds of thousands or millions of triangles. Add a Decimate modifier (or use limited-dissolve on flat areas) and aim for what your target engine and hardware can hold in memory. Bake a normal map from the high-res version if you want to keep the detail — that keeps the silhouette honest while the surface detail lives in a texture.
3. Fix normals and merge doubles. Recalculate normals outward (Shift+N in Edit Mode) and merge duplicate vertices. Inverted or split geometry shows up as black patches or light leaks in engines.
4. Separate terrain from buildings from roads. Engines like separate meshes per material or per collision type. Keep terrain, building blocks, and road decals as distinct objects so you can assign different collision and materials later.
5. Check your units. BlenderGIS georeferences the scene in real-world coordinates, and with a metric projection one Blender unit equals one meter. Set the scene units to meters (Scene > Units) so what you export matches what you measured.

FBX export settings that actually work

FBX is the right format for both engines — it carries meshes, UVs, materials, and (if needed) armatures in one file, while OBJ drops anything beyond static geometry. Use these settings in File > Export > FBX (.fbx):

• Forward: -Z Forward, Up: Y Up. These are Blender’s FBX exporter defaults and they convert Blender’s Z-up world into the axis convention most engines and viewers expect. Leave them at the defaults unless you have a reason to change them.
• Scale: 1.00, and tick Apply Scalings: FBX All. With scene units in meters and transforms applied, the exported mesh should arrive at true size. Do not compensate scale here; fix problems at import instead, so the source file stays honest.
• Path Mode: Copy, and tick Embed Textures. Basemap planes use image textures (satellite imagery, map tiles). Copying and embedding them means the engine import does not lose track of the image files.
• Only export what you selected. Tick Limit to: Selected Objects and select just the meshes for this export. Leaving the basemap camera rig or reference empties in the selection is how junk ends up in the engine scene.
• Smoothing: Face or Edge. Export face smoothing for organic terrain and edge smoothing for crisp building blocks, matching how the meshes were modeled.

One quirk to know: Blender is right-handed and Z-up; Unreal Engine is Z-up too, so geometry arrives oriented correctly. Unity is Y-up, so your terrain will look like it is lying flat on its back after import — the standard fix is to rotate the imported model -90 degrees around the X axis (or set the rotation in Unity’s model import settings) rather than re-exporting.

Import into Unreal Engine 5 and Unity

Unreal Engine 5. Drag the FBX into the Content Browser. In the import dialog, confirm the scale: Unreal uses centimeters, so a 1:1 meter model imported without conversion appears 100x too small. Set the import scale to 100 (or set Convert Scene Unit handling per your workflow). Assign the auto-generated collision or set the terrain mesh to Complex Collision As Simple for walkable ground, and split large terrain tiles if you plan to use World Partition streaming. Rebuild material instances from the imported textures — the basemap imagery comes through as texture assets you can drop into a standard material.

Unity. Drop the FBX into the Assets folder. In the model import settings, set Scale Factor to 1 if you modeled in meters (Unity units default to meters), apply the -90° X-axis rotation to fix the Y-up difference, and set material import to extract textures so the satellite and map imagery becomes reusable texture assets. For terrain specifically, consider importing the mesh as a static object with a Mesh Collider; very large single meshes may need splitting for the physics system to stay responsive.

Materials reality check. BlenderGIS objects use Blender’s Principled BSDF materials with projected satellite imagery. Engines rebuild materials from the imported textures, not from the shader graph — expect to re-plug the diffuse textures into a standard lit material in each engine, and bake anything exotic (procedural masks, vertex-color mixes) to texture maps before export.

Should I export as OBJ or FBX for game engines?

FBX. It carries meshes, UVs, material slots, and textures in one file, which OBJ cannot fully do. OBJ is fine for static geometry going into DCC tools, but for Unity and Unreal FBX is the standard and far less error-prone.

Why is my terrain tiny (or huge) after import?

Almost always unapplied transforms or a unit mismatch. In Blender, apply all transforms before export and keep scene units in meters; at import, remember Unreal works in centimeters (scale by 100) while Unity defaults to meters. Fix scale at one end only, not both.

Why does my model look rotated in Unity but fine in Unreal?

Unity is Y-up and Blender is Z-up. Apply a -90° rotation on the X axis in Unity’s model import settings. Unreal is Z-up like Blender, so geometry arrives oriented correctly there.

Do the satellite textures come through?

Yes, if you export with Path Mode set to Copy and Embed Textures enabled. The imagery arrives as texture assets in the engine; you then plug them into a standard material yourself. The Blender shader graph itself does not transfer.

Can I export the buildings separately from the terrain?

You should. Select only the objects you want in each export (use the exporter’s Limit to Selected Objects option). Separate meshes per layer — terrain, buildings, roads — make collision setup and material assignment far easier in the engine.

How big can an exported terrain be?

As big as your engine project can stream, not as big as BlenderGIS can import. Raw DEM meshes easily reach millions of triangles; decimate aggressively, bake normals, and split into tiles (Unreal’s World Partition or Unity’s addressable chunks) for anything larger than a small site.