Joe Solo
The character is lying on its side. Or it's the size of a coin. Or it's just... grey.
None of those tell you what actually went wrong, and Blender never warned you.
By the time the engine complains, you're guessing which of a dozen things
caused it.
Shipshape checks the model before it leaves Blender. It looks over your character
or prop, tells you in plain language what will break, offers a fix where one is
safe, and exports with settings that are known to work.
What it checks
Your skeleton
- Scale and rotation applied
- One root bone, sitting at the world origin
- Whether anything is actually bound to it
- Whether it's a control rig you shouldn't be exporting at all
- Deform bones still being driven by live constraints
- Bone names suited to Unity's Humanoid rig (Unity only)
Your mesh
- Scale and rotation applied
- A sensible real-world size
- Bound to the right skeleton
- Vertex groups matching real bones
- Unweighted vertices, weight totals, bones per vertex
- A material, real image textures rather than procedural ones, texture files
actually present
- Non-manifold geometry, flipped normals, inside-out models, loose vertices,
degenerate faces, non-flat n-gons
Twenty-five checks. Every one of them explains itself.
Export presets that were actually tested
One button per engine. Leaf bones off, deform bones only, no cameras or lights,
correct smoothing and tangents, textures copied alongside. Press "What does
the export do? " to read exactly what it sets, in plain language — nothing is
hidden.
These weren't guessed from forum posts. Both presets were verified by
importing into the real engine and reading back what the engine produced
Unreal 5.8 and Unity 6. Correct size, correct orientation, correct skeleton,
measured rather than eyeballed.
Export is blocked while there are red errors, and tells you how many. Warnings
don't block. You can override if you need to.
Requirements
- Blender 4.5 LTS or 5.x — both tested
- Windows, Linux and SteamOS — pure Python, no platform-specific code
- Works with Rigify, Game Rig Tools, Auto-Rig Pro, Mixamo and hand-built rigs
- Nothing online. No account, no login, no phone-home. It runs entirely on
your machine.