How much of this can be ported to Unity? I know the assets can be, but is there a way to port the materials and lighting effects? I've only ever imported individual assets (i.e. a tree object, etc.)
If you export as an FBX , the materials will be imbedded with the mesh.
Import the model into Unity then extract the textures into the Unity assets folder. Create a new Material in blender with the same name and assign the textures that you extracted.
I think the model will pick it up automatically if it has the same name, if not, just drag and drop the material on the model.
That's a short and possibly not complete answer. It's late here and I haven't done it for a while so the details are a bit foggy right now.
I doubt this whole scene with materials and lighting could be ported to Unity intuitively or easily. Especially since I use procedural textures extensively - all of this would have to be baked down into texture maps, thus needing UVs to be laid out for all the objects...then the lighting and volumetric fog which I have no idea if those are exportable at all.
All that to say I think a port would be more of a recreation in Unity. I'm getting a headache just imagining the process 😅
However Blender -> Unity pipelines are common and can be done smoothly. I would have needed to build the scene different from the start in Blender (with Unity in mind). Like laying out UVs and baking procedural textures as I went and not waiting for the export.
Okay thank you. Right now I'm just trying to import the trees themselves, but I can't seem to get the material to transfer. I've tried baking the texture, but in Unity it just looks all green or all brown depending on my settings. I'm not sure how to get Unity to differentiate between the needles and the trunk/stems like we did in Blender with the vertex colors. If you have any tips on this, I would appreciate it!
Take a look at the last chapter of this course: https://cgcookie.com/course/creating-animated-sci-fi-game-assets