Default Scale Units

One blender unit is equal to one unit (meter) in Torque at the default 1:1 scale. The default cube mesh in Blender is 2 x 2 x 2 units.  Scale it to half size and you've got a handy 1 x 1 x 1 meter reference cube.

Here is a handy table listing the conversion from 1 Blender unit to various length measurements for Torque

Anisotropic (non-uniform) scale

Anisotropic or non-uniform scale occurs when an object or bone is scaled differently on its x y and z axes.   Exporting animated objects and bones with anisotropic scale from Blender is problematic.  Matrices containing both rotation and anisotropic scale cannot be accurately (or at all?) decomposed into the rotation and scale values that the dts file format requires.  To make matters worse, the transform matrices that Blender makes available to the Python API suffer from gimbal lock problems that cannot be corrected by an export script.  The problem can even be seen within Blender; if an object or bone has a "copy rotation" constraint with a target object/bone that has anisotropic scale, the constrained bone will rotate all over the place as gimbal lock occurs and copied rotations will be inaccurate even when gimbal lock is not occurring.

There are some cases in which anisotropic scale animations are useful for special effects, bouncing balls that compress when they hit the ground, etc.  For this reason I have created a special "two pass" export mode that allows for anisotropic scale animations to be exported accurately.  In the first pass, the "two pass" animation export mode deletes all of Blender's object and bone scale keyframes and IPO curves.  It then cycles through the frames and grabs accurate rotation and location values for each object/bone.  After the first pass is complete, the exporter re-creates all of the object/bone keyframes and IPO curves from data that has been stored in memory.  The second pass examines the scale of each object/bone using a different method (not the Blender matrices).  Obviously there is some risk involved in destroying and re-creating the user defined animation curves and keyframes.  It is possible that the exporter might not accurately re-create the keyframes in some circumstances.  An exporter crash might also leave the keyframes destroyed with no possibility of recovery.  It is therefore recommended that the "two pass" animation export mode only be used with shapes that absolutely must animate ansiotropic scale values.  The "two pass" mode is turned off by default.