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Unity Quick Start

Stream your Blender scene live into the Unity editor, then bake it to real prefabs. This guide gets you from install to a synced scene in a few minutes.

Requirements: Blender 4.2+, Unity 2022.3 LTS or newer with the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), both on the same machine (loopback TCP).

1. Install the Blender add-on

  1. In Blender, open Edit, Preferences, Add-ons.
  2. Use the menu and choose Install from Disk, then pick a zip of the blender/loom/ folder.
  3. Enable Loom in the list.
  4. The panel appears in the 3D Viewport, N sidebar, Loom tab.

2. Install the Unity package

  1. In Unity, open Window, Package Manager.
  2. Click Add package from disk and select unity/com.desu.loom/package.json. A UPM git-URL install also works.
  3. Make sure your project uses URP. Loom’s generated shaders target it, and the window warns if URP is not active.

3. Connect

  1. In Unity, open Window, Loom and press Start Listener. The status reads Listening on 127.0.0.1:8787.
  2. In Blender’s Loom sidebar panel, press Connect. Both sides default to 127.0.0.1:8787, so on one machine it just connects.
  3. The Unity window shows Connected, and your synced objects appear under a single Loom GameObject in the active scene.

Now edit in Blender. Meshes, rigs, lights and cameras stream into Unity live. Moving an object sends a tiny transform packet, and sculpting or animating streams positions only.

4. Sync materials

Materials are kept off the realtime path. Press Sync Materials in the Blender panel (or the Unity window) to push Principled materials and node-graph shaders. Supported graphs become real compiled URP shaders, and unsupported ones fall back to a faithful Principled material. The diagnostics panel tells you which.

5. Bake to a prefab

When you are happy with the preview, press Bake to Prefab in the Unity window. Loom dedups shared meshes and generated materials into single assets, writes node-graph shaders as real .shader files, and saves a prefab over the synced tree. Toggle lightmap UVs, LOD groups and colliders at bake time.

Tips and toggles

  • Selective sync. Stream only a chosen collection or just the selection, and freeze a finished object so it stops updating while you iterate.
  • Hand-edit protection. Blender is the source of truth, but if you nudge a synced object in Unity, Loom pauses updates to it rather than overwriting, until you Release it.
  • Two-way edits. Flip Push edits to Blender to send transform and selection changes back.
  • Play mode. Enable Sync during Play to stream live edits into a running Play session. It keeps ticking even when Unity is unfocused.
  • Colliders and LOD. Name proxies UCX_, UBX_, USP_, UCP_, UMC_ and siblings <base>_LOD0..n. They become Unity colliders and LODGroups live and at bake.

Troubleshooting

  • Blender says “Waiting for Unity”. Press Start Listener in the Unity window first.
  • Materials look flat or default. Press Sync Materials. Materials do not ride the live geometry stream.
  • Nothing renders, or it is pink. Confirm the project is on URP. The Loom window flags it if not.
  • Background updates feel slow. Unity throttles its background repaint. Raise it under Preferences, General, Interaction Mode, “No Throttling”.

See Architecture for how the link works.