Importing from the Blender experiment
Unity offers some basic geometric shapes but when it comes to more complex models, you'll need to go beyond Unity. The Unity Asset Store has tons of amazing models (plus many other kinds of assets), and there are lots of other websites with large communities that share 3D models for fun and profit. Where do these models come from? Will you run into problems while importing them into Unity?
I know that this book is about Unity, but we're going on a short side adventure right now. We're going to use Blender (version 2.7x), a free and open source 3D animation suite (http://www.blender.org/), to make a model and then import it into Unity. Grab a coffee and strap yourself in!
The plan is not to build anything very fancy right now. We'll just build a cube and a simple texture map. The purpose of this exercise is to find out how well a one-unit cube in Blender imports with the same scale and orientation into Unity.
Feel free to skip this section...