Studio, Toolkit, SDK, or Pipeline Automation: choose your Asset Transformer tool
How to choose your 3D data preparation workflow
CAD, BIM, and scan data are built for engineering and capture, not for real-time rendering. Before any of it runs in an interactive application, it needs tessellation, optimization, and scaling. That work traditionally falls to 3D artists, by hand, one file at a time.
Unity Asset Transformer does that work for you. It reads more than 70 CAD, BIM, mesh, and point cloud formats, converts them, and optimizes them for real-time 3D performance on any device. It’s available through Unity in multiple product configurations to suit your workflows.
Which Asset Transformer tool is right for you?
Unity Asset Transformer is a suite of tools that converts and optimizes CAD, BIM, mesh, and point cloud data for real-time 3D applications. Use Studio for hands-on work on individual assets, the Toolkit for rule-based imports into the Unity Editor, the SDK for batch processing in your own infrastructure and as a part of larger workflows, and Pipeline Automation for transformations that run on Unity's infrastructure.
How to choose the right tool for your workflow
Most teams end up in one of five workflows. Which one fits depends less on your industry than on four things:
- How many assets you process and how much individual customization they need
- Whether the assets are primarily needed inside Unity projects
- If you want to build transformations into more complex workflows
- How much of it should run unattended, on your infrastructure or Unity's.
Workflow 1: Prepare individual complex assets, by hand
What it looks like. You have a detailed assembly, such as an engine or a machine, and it matters that it looks just right. You want to open the model, apply decimation, adjust the quality level, and see the result before you commit. Every asset gets your attention.
What it needs. A visual interface with immediate 3D feedback. You also may need the output to go somewhere other than Unity.
Start with Asset Transformer Studio. A standalone desktop application that runs on your own machine. It converts and optimizes data, and exports it to real-time engines (like the Unity Editor) and other software. You ingest a file, run algorithms through the interface, and watch the model update as you work. It’s a useful addition to any workflow where a user is new to Asset Transformer or needs ongoing visual confirmation on outputs. It’s a strong fit for human-led processes and manual customization of individual assets. Studio handles scan data as well as CAD, so point clouds captured by laser scanner, photogrammetry, or LiDAR open in the same visual interface for inspection and cleanup. Workflow 5 covers scan preparation across the suite in more depth.
Workflow 2: Apply the same treatment to many similar assets inside a Unity project
What it looks like. You are processing the parts of a factory or the components of a vehicle. The assets differ in detail but not in kind, and they all end up in Unity. Doing each one by hand is the bottleneck.
What it needs. Rules you define once and reuse. Something that decides, per object, what to keep, what to strip, and what to replace.
Start with the Asset Transformer Toolkit. A feature included in the Unity Industry license that runs inside the Unity Editor and processes assets once you import them, using conditional rule sets. You trigger the import manually, the rules then run automatically on what comes in, and they are re-applied automatically whenever an asset is re-imported. You can build rules such as delete an object when its metadata matches an identifier, replace a material when it matches a type, or remove an object below a size threshold. It also brings Asset Transformer's algorithms directly into the Editor, with features you get nowhere else in the suite, such as collider generation and LOD generation. Save and version your rule sets as part of your Unity project, then reuse them as a recipe for that category of asset.
Asset Transformer Toolkit | Documentation | Toolkit 3.1 supported formats page
Workflow 3: Transform assets on demand, without standing anything up
What it looks like. You need assets prepped where they already live. A supplier file needs a preview before anyone opens it. A colleague needs a Unity-ready export of a model this afternoon. Or new CAD keeps landing in your PLM and the live application built on it should reflect that without a manual pass. Nobody wants to install another tool or start from scratch.
What it needs. Transformations that run on Unity’s infrastructure rather than yours, triggered from the systems your team already uses.
Through Unity Asset Manager when you need simple conversions and transformations. Included with Unity Industry, Asset Manager is a cloud-based digital asset management solution that streamlines how teams can upload, manage, transform, share, and access their complex real-time 3D assets. Upload an asset and Unity generates a glb preview automatically. The Optimize & Convert tool converts to standard formats and applies typical transformations needed to prepare your assets for real-time performance.
Through Pipeline Automation when you want transformations on demand, or when transformation is one step in a larger process. Run transformations directly in the Unity Cloud dashboard with simple pay-as-you-go pricing that scales with your usage. Pipeline Automation is a broader workflow tool that Asset Transformer plugs into as a step, so you can build a transformation-only pipeline when that is all you need, or build transformation into an end-to-end process. Spanning ingestion, optimization, delivery into your live app, and more, Pipeline Automation allows you to retire the repetitive asset prep and management workflows your team currently manages by hand.
Workflow 4: Process assets at scale inside your own infrastructure
What it looks like. The processing has to happen on your machines, in your environment, at scale. Perhaps the data cannot leave your network, or the transformation step has to sit inside a pipeline your team already runs and maintains. Volume is also likely high, with a preference for workflows and automation over individual processing.
What it needs. Code-level access to the transformation algorithms, headless execution that scales, and the freedom to deploy it wherever your data lives.
Start with the Asset Transformer SDK. Asset Transformer SDK is an ideal solution for headless processing. It gives Python and C# access to the same core transformation technology that Studio and the Toolkit are built on. The difference that matters is batch processing: Studio runs on one machine and one file at a time, while the SDK processes files in bulk, unattended, on premises or in your own cloud environment. And for teams running transformations at scale, you can purchase additional licenses to run more processes in parallel to increase throughput. You can also leverage the SDK to build custom workflows - for example, to watch a folder for uploads, detect a new file, run a predefined series of transformations based on file type, then push the finished assets into a content management system such as Unity Asset Manager. More broadly, the SDK lets you inject Asset Transformer's algorithms into your own workflows, at whatever point in the pipeline you need them.
An SDK entitlement covers both ways of running Asset Transformer inside your own environment. Call the SDK directly from your own code, or self-host Pipeline Automation, Unity's workflow automation tool, to build the same transformations into orchestrated pipelines. Same algorithms and the same security boundary either way, helping to ensure your data remains in your infrastructure.
Asset Transformer SDK | Documentation | SDK 2026.1 supported formats page
Workflow 5: Prepare scan data and point clouds
What it looks like. Your source is not CAD. It is a scan, captured by laser scanner, photogrammetry, or LiDAR. A single dataset can hold millions or billions of points, far more than a GPU can render at interactive frame rates. The file often carries stray polygons and lines left behind by the scanning pipeline, too.
What it needs. Four steps, in order:
- Import the scan
- Strip the non-point geometry
- Reduce the density
- Segment the result spatially, so the engine can cull whatever the camera cannot see. Reductions of 50 to 90 percent are normal while visual quality holds.
Start with Asset Transformer Studio when the right reduction is a judgment call, or when the output is not headed for Unity. You import the cloud, apply reductions through the interface, and check the result at each step before committing.
Use the Asset Transformer Toolkit when the scan fits in memory and lands in Unity. It imports E57, RCP, PTS, PTX, PLY, and glTF point clouds. Its segmentation parameter divides the cloud into a grid of GameObjects, and a segmentation value of 10 produces at most 1,000 of them. That is what lets Unity apply frustum culling and skip everything off screen.
Move to the Asset Transformer SDK when the scan is too big for memory. The SDK adds out-of-core processing. It imports the bounding box first, walks the volume one voxel at a time, processes and exports each in turn, then combines the results once they are small enough to hold. Unity's guidance is to reach for this when the file exceeds 50 to 75 percent of available RAM, when import fails with memory errors, or when you are working with billions of points. It is slower than normal processing, so treat it as the answer to a memory problem, not a default.
One thing to plan around: out-of-core processing currently works on E57, PTS, and PTX only. RCP and RCS files load all or nothing, ignoring the IO settings, so a scan in those formats still has to fit in memory.
All four are built on the same core technology, so results stay consistent whichever you use. Most teams pair two rather than adopt everything. A technical artist might work in Studio while the Toolkit handles the assets flowing into Unity. A team that has outgrown manual prep might run the SDK with Pipeline Automation, writing the transformations once and orchestrating them from there.
What your license covers
Next steps
Check out the Unity Asset Transformer overview for what the suite covers, or the getting started guide for answers to the most common questions about the four products.
