Build an automated pipeline to convert CAD and other industrial files to optimized 3D assets

Where is your organization’s 3D data? Is it dispersed across CAD, BIM, and other file formats that only a few colleagues can access? Or in project folders and drives managed by different teams?

By transforming and centralizing your diverse industrial files into production-ready 3D assets, you’ll lay the foundation for creators and developers in your organization to use those assets to create any kind of real-time 3D experience. From immersive training applications, to interactive visualizations full of true-to-life visual fidelity and detail, real-time 3D supports faster reviews and decisions, lowers costs, and reaches a wider audience.

A resilient 3D data foundation

Unity Industry provides an ecosystem of tools and services for organizations building 3D industrial applications. This guide focuses on the key collaborative layer: Unity Asset Manager, and specifically, how to build an automated pipeline that converts your industrial files into optimized and organized 3D assets that are ready to use in real-time applications.

Unity Asset Manager + Pipeline Automation: Centralize, standardize, automate – on your terms

In this guide, you’ll follow along with the steps for converting and optimizing a newly uploaded CAD or other industrial file to a 3D asset, according to the standards and permissions required by a specific project, without manual intervention.

Unity Asset Manager gives organizations a secure, scalable foundation to govern, transform, and share 3D data enterprise-wide, unlocking ROI from existing 3D investments while creating the infrastructure for interactive 3D to scale across the business.

You get a centralized repository for all 3D assets across your organization, that preserves metadata, version history, and lifecycle status so teams can always pull from a single approved source.

Unity Pipeline Automation, which is currently in beta, is a tool that helps you to create, trigger, and monitor pipelines using services and technology made with Unity or key third parties.

Based on feedback from Unity Industry customers, a single asset might take 10 minutes or more to convert and optimize. Multiply that by dozens of files and you’re easily using hours every week to transform industrial data into 3D assets.

Together, Unity Asset Manager and Pipeline Automation enable you to:

• Cut out repetitive 3D work to boost efficiency and scale
• Centralize 3D data and democratize access
• Standardize and regulate 3D data

Step-by-step: Build your first automated pipeline

Note: If you are not a Unity Industry subscriber but want to try these steps yourself, you can get a 30-day free trial.

When teams turn CAD, BIM, and other industrial files into 3D assets, the workflow is usually to import the files into a tool that converts them to 3D assets, and then optimizes and organizes them in a shared view, so they’re ready to drop into real-time 3D applications. 

Unity Pipeline Automation eliminates much of the manual repetition in the CAD/industrial files-to-3D asset workflow. With Pipeline Automation, you can automate steps such as manual configuration, data formatting, and notification. Define each rule once and Unity Pipeline Automation handles the processing automatically in the background.

Before diving into the steps, it’s useful to understand the three main sections to Unity Pipeline Automation:

1. A pipeline is a sequence of steps that process assets.

2. You set up automations that will decide when the pipeline runs.

3. Jobs are the individual executions within a pipeline that run its steps.

Follow along to learn about the logic, or architecture, of a pipeline, how to build the pipeline, connect it to an event-based automation, and run the job end-to-end.

1. Create the pipeline

You’ll start in the Unity Dashboard. This guide assumes a user has the Automation Developer role, which can be granted by the administrator of your organization’s Unity account via the Member section in the dashboard.

1. Once you log into the Unity Dashboard, click the + button next to the Shortcuts menu item and select Pipeline Automation to add quick access.

2. Via the Pipeline Automation menu item, open the Templates view, and choose the template called Optimize and Convert 3D Asset. This is a built-in starter template available to all Unity Asset Manager users.

3. This template contains four predetermined steps, but you can modify it if needed by clicking on the + button to add a new step. Each step comprises an application that triggers an action.

4. Let’s look at the steps included already in the Optimize and Convert template:

• The first step downloads the source file from the Asset Manager into the pipeline workspace, a temporary area that exists only for the job.
• The second step optimizes and converts the model, applying polygon reduction and converting it into a file format like FBX.
• The third step creates a new asset entry in the Asset Manager.
• The fourth step uploads the optimized file into that asset entry.

5. You can give a template a new name, select Create, and save it.

6. Next, via Pipeline Automation > Pipelines, find the newly named pipeline in Draft status. You can edit and use a draft pipeline. Run the pipeline manually first to confirm it works before automating it. Promote it to Available before further changes to help the automation return consistent results. Once promoted, this version will be locked for edits and deletions, requiring the creation of a new version to make any future changes.

7. Click Run on the pipeline. Select the project that contains your files, for example CAD files. Choose the file to transform and enter the name for the optimized result, for example, by adding the suffix “_optimized”. Leave optional parameters at their default values.

8. Click Run on the dropdown menu to run the pipeline. This creates a job, so open the Jobs view (under the Pipeline Automation sub-menu), find the job, and open it to see the status of each of the steps.

9. You can also access the logs to see details about each step if you need to debug issues.

10. The system can run many jobs concurrently so your workload scales automatically. Once the job status is succeeded, return to Unity Asset Manager and view the resulting optimized asset.

2. Connect the pipeline to an automation

Now it’s time to connect this pipeline to an automation so it runs automatically when new assets are submitted.

11. Open the Automations view and create a new automation.

12. Choose Event-based automation.

13. Select Unity Asset Manager as the app that emits the event and pick the event called Asset version is submitted.

14. For this example, leave the filter fields open to any value except the Asset Type filter, which should be set to 3D Model so that only 3D models can trigger the automation.

15. Choose which pipeline to run; the most recently updated pipelines appear at the top of the list. You can confirm the version and the status after selection.

16. Map fields from the Asset Manager event to the pipeline parameters; use projectid in the Project ID field, assetid in the Asset to transform field, and use a simple pattern for the new asset name, e.g., the original name preceded by the word “new”.

17. In this example, we’re working with an automation bot that was already created. For your own projects, you’ll have to assign an automation bot with permissions to run the pipeline. Automation bots are created by organization owners. To do this, you’ll need a service account with an Asset Manager admin role that runs the pipeline on behalf of your organization.

3. Run the new pipeline

18. In the Asset Manager, you can create or update a 3D model, for example, by uploading a new version of a CAD model and saving it. When you confirm the change, the Asset version submitted event fires.

As the automation bot is listening for that event and the Asset Type is set to 3D Model, it triggers a new job for your optimization pipeline. Once the job is finished, you'll find the newly created and optimized asset in your data set. It's ready to be used in downstream workflows or Unity projects.

Before closing, here are three tips help keep automations reliable:

• Keep folder structure organized: Separate input and output locations instead of mixing automated assets with manual ones.
• Use filters strategically: Not every asset needs to go through every step. Focusing automations on assets that benefit most saves time and resources.
• Test with a sample file first: Run the pipeline on a small set of representative assets to catch configurations early.