I was interested in Maquette as more than a standalone design tool. The practical question was whether a designer could shape a scene in VR, preserve its organization and materials, and pass something useful to a Unity developer without rebuilding the whole idea by hand.
Why I made this
The official add-on promised an FBX-to-prefab workflow, but compatibility was already fragile. Unity 2018.2's new prefab system produced warnings, so the reproducible path required a new project in Unity 2018.1 or earlier.
A one-time import was not enough. Spatial design is iterative, which meant the workflow also had to handle repeated exports, third-party objects, folder synchronization, scale differences, and the possibility that regenerating a prefab would destroy scene associations.
What I did
I start with a compatible Unity version, install the Maquette add-on, and import a simple FBX. The add-on generates a prefab while preserving the scene's grouping and materials, which gives the developer a much more useful starting point than a flattened model.
To remove a repeated manual step, I write a small xcopy script that mirrors Maquette's export folder into the Unity project. I also test Google Poly objects and show the required preparation: they have to be converted to editable Maquette content before they will appear in Unity.
Then I push on the workflow instead of stopping after the successful import. Re-exporting recreates the generated prefab and breaks the association with the instance already placed in the scene. I show that destructive behavior, demonstrate how to regenerate a prefab from the FBX, and explain the implications for iteration.
I close with the broader handoff I was testing: create detailed assets in a tool such as Medium, arrange the spatial experience in Maquette, and move the organized result into Unity for implementation.
Chapters
Select a chapter to jump the video directly to that part of the workflow.
A note on the archive
This video uses Microsoft Maquette and Unity 2018.1. Microsoft says Maquette is no longer under active development and access through the Microsoft Store has been discontinued, although a download remains available for existing projects and archival use.
Unity's prefab system and spatial-design tooling have also changed since 2019. I wouldn’t recommend this as a new production pipeline today. I’m keeping it because it shows the useful parts, the automation I added, and the destructive limitation I found while testing the handoff.