Unity 2019.1.0f2: Blender could not convert the .blend file to FBX file

Question

I didn't touch anything but:

• launch Unity Hub
• clicked on "Official Releases"
• choose Unity 2019.1.0f2
• installed it
• opened my projects

When the (very long) import is done, I get this error :

Blender could not convert the .blend file to FBX file.
You need to use Blender 2.45-2.49 or 2.58 and later versions for direct Blender import to work.

Of course, I'm using the latest version of Blender (2.79b) and everything was working flawlessly with Unity 2018.3.13f.

So none of my projects work because of this problem. If I re-open it in previous Unity version (2018.3.13f) it works.

Everything I've found so far on Internet is about "Microsoft released something that made Python work differently hence this problem". But this can't be that problem right now.

Any idea?

Answer 1

The lates version of Blender is the 2.80 Beta

According to this post it seems to be a Unity "bug".

Apparently they had to change something in the import script in order to work with Blender 2.80 which at the same moment broke the import for files created with older Blender versions.

Unity 2018.3 had the issue the other way round and could not open files created with Blender 2.80.

---

The workaround from that post was to copy the

2018.3.XXX\Editor\Data\Tools\Unity-BlenderToFBX.py

from a Unity 2018.3 install into the the new 2019.1.0f2 installation and overwrite the according file

2019.1.0f2\Editor\Data\Tools\Unity-BlenderToFBX.py

---

Alternatively you can always manually export the Blender file (the best example I've found)(there are tons of tutorials but apparently none from Blender itself ^^) to FBX than there should be no(less) problems importing it into Unity.

Answer 2

I found that I had this problem with unity 2020.1.16f1 and blender 2.91 on windows. Posting my fix here in case it helps others.

give the Unity hub and the installed unity.exe "run as administrator" privilege's so that the intermediate files have the permision to be written. Also, verify that blender 2.91 is set as the system default for "open with" on all .blend files.