Why do my 3D models look so different when imported into Unity?

Question

I am importing an image from Maya into Unity but the shapes look drastically different from one another as well as the color and I am not sure what is causing this how can I fix it?

From maya

From Unity

Answer 1

I made a quick mockup with primitives in Unity, and it looks like this could be explained with just camera settings:

This is the same collection of primitives, rendered with two cameras in Unity simultaneously in splitscreen.

• On the left I've used an orthographic camera, which is able to see a whole hemisphere of the body all at once. That makes the face look quite small in comparison to the full diameter.

• On the right I've used a camera with a very wide field of view, positioned quite close to the penguin's beak.

  Because it's so close, the face appears very large in the camera's view, while more distant content like the distance between the wingtips shrinks away. (Think of looking down a set of parallel railroad tracks - the ties are the same width all the way down, but as they get further away it looks like they get shorter and the rails seem to converge).

  This camera is too close to the body sphere to see more than a portion of it - the rest curls away from its view, like the Earth curving away over the horizon.

So, how do you fix this?

You can...

• Use an orthographic camera in Unity if you like that pure geometric look

• Or, using a perspective camera, pull your viewpoint back away from the character, so there's not such a drastic difference in relative depth from its front to its back (perspective distortion is sharpest near the camera, where moving a few centimeters doubles your distance from the "lens". Far from the camera, the same depth change is pocket change relative to the total depth).

  If this makes the object too small on screen, reduce your camera's field of view, which effectively zooms back in without adding shape distortion. As the camera FoV gets narrower and it pulls further away, it becomes more "orthographic-like" - this is the trick used in those dolly zoom shots in movies:

  

  Here we start with a distant & tight camera, shifting to a close & wide one, making the background appear to shrink or zoom away while the foreground stays almost the same.