Let’s build a small experience together: a little fox sitting in a forest of sound. Along the way you will learn the basics of bringing models and audio into Unity, which is all you need to start making your own work.
Find your model
Unity is not a modelling tool, so models are made elsewhere and imported. You don’t need to make everything yourself though. There are lots of good places to find 3D models, both free and paid:
Unity Asset Store — models, animations and sounds that import straight into Unity. This is what we use below.
Sketchfab — a huge library, with many free models under Creative Commons licenses.
CGTrader and TurboSquid — large marketplaces with both free and paid models.
For this example we use the free Toon Fox by Pxltiger. It comes with a set of animations, which we will use later on the Animations page.
Always check the license of a model before you use it in a published experience. Assets from the Unity Asset Store come with the Standard Unity Asset Store EULA, which allows you to use them in your own projects.
Import the model into Unity
Open the Toon Fox page on the Asset Store, log in with your Unity account and press Add to My Assets.
In Unity, open Window > Package Management > Package Manager, select My Assets and search for Toon Fox. Press Download.
When the download is done, press Import.
A window shows everything in the package. Leave everything ticked and press Import.
The fox now appears in your Project window, in the folder Fox. Open Fox > Prefabs and drag the Fox into the Hierarchy.
Fix pink materials
If your fox looks bright pink, its material was made for an older type of Unity project. Meadow uses the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), so the material needs to be converted.
In the Project window, open Fox > Materials and select M_Fox.
In the top menu, choose Edit > Rendering > Materials > Convert Selected Built-In Materials to Current SRP, and press Proceed in the dialog that follows.
The fox gets its colours back. You can use the same trick on any older model you import.
Remove the demo animation
The fox comes with a demo Animator Controller that plays all of its animations one after the other, and makes it run off across the scene. We’ll make our own on the Animations page, so remove it for now:
Select the Fox in the Hierarchy.
In the Animator component in the Inspector, click the Controller field and press backspace, so it says None.
Check the size
Models often arrive in very different sizes. Unity’s unit is meters, so a model made in centimeters can turn up a hundred times too big. In AR this matters a lot, as your work will appear at real scale in the world.
An easy way to check the size is to compare it with a default cube, which is always 1 × 1 × 1 meter. Right click in the Hierarchy and choose 3D Object > Cube.
Move the cube next to the fox. Our fox is almost two meters tall, a giant!
Select the Fox and find the Transform component in the Inspector. Set Scale to 0.4 on all three axes. Tip: press the little chain icon to the left of Scale to keep the proportions.
Delete the cube, we don’t need it anymore. Select it and press Cmd + Delete (Ctrl + Delete on Windows).
Make a folder for your experience
Keep everything that belongs to your experience in one folder. Later on, this folder is what gets uploaded to Meadow.
Right click in an empty area of the Project window and choose Create > Folder.
Give it the name of your experience, for example MyFirstExperience.
Double click the folder to open it.
Add a sound
Sound is one of the strongest tools you have in AR. A sound placed in space makes a virtual object feel present, even when you look away from it.
Unity works with most common audio formats, like WAV, MP3 and OGG. Unity compresses all audio when the experience is built, so when audio is important, use a lossless format like WAV to avoid compressing it twice.
Find a sound you would like to use, and drag it from Finder (or Explorer) into your experience folder.
Now create an Audio Source, a virtual speaker in space. Right click in the Hierarchy and choose Create Empty. This creates an empty GameObject: an object with nothing but a position, rotation and scale.
Name it Forest Sound, so you can keep track of it.
With Forest Sound selected, press Add Component in the Inspector, search for Audio Source and select it.
In the Audio Source, press the small circle next to Audio Generator (this field is called AudioClip in older Unity versions).
Double click your sound to assign it.
Tick Loop, so the sound keeps playing.
Drag Spatial Blend all the way to 3D. The sound now comes from a point in space, and gets quieter the further away you are.
Under 3D Sound Settings, set Max Distance to 3. This makes the difference easy to hear when you walk around.
Your Audio Source should now look like this:
Save your scene
Most things you do in Unity are saved automatically, but the scene is not. Save it with Cmd + S (Ctrl + S on Windows) or File > Save. The first time, give it a name and save it in your experience folder.
Let’s build a small experience together: a little fox sitting in a forest of sound. Along the way you will learn the basics of bringing models and audio into Unity, which is all you need to start making your own work.
Find your model
Unity is not a modelling tool, so models are made elsewhere and imported. You don’t need to make everything yourself though. There are lots of good places to find 3D models, both free and paid:
Unity Asset Store — models, animations and sounds that import straight into Unity. This is what we use below.
Sketchfab — a huge library, with many free models under Creative Commons licenses.
CGTrader and TurboSquid — large marketplaces with both free and paid models.
For this example we use the free Toon Fox by Pxltiger. It comes with a set of animations, which we will use later on the Animations page.
Always check the license of a model before you use it in a published experience. Assets from the Unity Asset Store come with the Standard Unity Asset Store EULA, which allows you to use them in your own projects.
Import the model into Unity
Open the Toon Fox page on the Asset Store, log in with your Unity account and press Add to My Assets.
In Unity, open Window > Package Management > Package Manager, select My Assets and search for Toon Fox. Press Download.
When the download is done, press Import.
A window shows everything in the package. Leave everything ticked and press Import.
The fox now appears in your Project window, in the folder Fox. Open Fox > Prefabs and drag the Fox into the Hierarchy.
Fix pink materials
If your fox looks bright pink, its material was made for an older type of Unity project. Meadow uses the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), so the material needs to be converted.
In the Project window, open Fox > Materials and select M_Fox.
In the top menu, choose Edit > Rendering > Materials > Convert Selected Built-In Materials to Current SRP, and press Proceed in the dialog that follows.
The fox gets its colours back. You can use the same trick on any older model you import.
Remove the demo animation
The fox comes with a demo Animator Controller that plays all of its animations one after the other, and makes it run off across the scene. We’ll make our own on the Animations page, so remove it for now:
Select the Fox in the Hierarchy.
In the Animator component in the Inspector, click the Controller field and press backspace, so it says None.
Check the size
Models often arrive in very different sizes. Unity’s unit is meters, so a model made in centimeters can turn up a hundred times too big. In AR this matters a lot, as your work will appear at real scale in the world.
An easy way to check the size is to compare it with a default cube, which is always 1 × 1 × 1 meter. Right click in the Hierarchy and choose 3D Object > Cube.
Move the cube next to the fox. Our fox is almost two meters tall, a giant!
Select the Fox and find the Transform component in the Inspector. Set Scale to 0.4 on all three axes. Tip: press the little chain icon to the left of Scale to keep the proportions.
Delete the cube, we don’t need it anymore. Select it and press Cmd + Delete (Ctrl + Delete on Windows).
Make a folder for your experience
Keep everything that belongs to your experience in one folder. Later on, this folder is what gets uploaded to Meadow.
Right click in an empty area of the Project window and choose Create > Folder.
Give it the name of your experience, for example MyFirstExperience.
Double click the folder to open it.
Add a sound
Sound is one of the strongest tools you have in AR. A sound placed in space makes a virtual object feel present, even when you look away from it.
Unity works with most common audio formats, like WAV, MP3 and OGG. Unity compresses all audio when the experience is built, so when audio is important, use a lossless format like WAV to avoid compressing it twice.
Find a sound you would like to use, and drag it from Finder (or Explorer) into your experience folder.
Now create an Audio Source, a virtual speaker in space. Right click in the Hierarchy and choose Create Empty. This creates an empty GameObject: an object with nothing but a position, rotation and scale.
Name it Forest Sound, so you can keep track of it.
With Forest Sound selected, press Add Component in the Inspector, search for Audio Source and select it.
In the Audio Source, press the small circle next to Audio Generator (this field is called AudioClip in older Unity versions).
Double click your sound to assign it.
Tick Loop, so the sound keeps playing.
Drag Spatial Blend all the way to 3D. The sound now comes from a point in space, and gets quieter the further away you are.
Under 3D Sound Settings, set Max Distance to 3. This makes the difference easy to hear when you walk around.
Your Audio Source should now look like this:
Save your scene
Most things you do in Unity are saved automatically, but the scene is not. Save it with Cmd + S (Ctrl + S on Windows) or File > Save. The first time, give it a name and save it in your experience folder.
