When blender 2.80 goes into production, a minor update will occur to change the version to production & move Blender2Babylon-5.6.zip to the deprecated directory. The Blender 2.80 version is increasingly more production worthy by the day. Think you would be advised to start looking at it, since the learning curve for all the changes will take some time.
In addition to the changes below, some other topics got written which also highlight how things are now different:
Moved all exporter level custom properties from scene tab to world tab
Changes to world tab:
Added properties from scene tab
Added Sky Box / Environment Textures section
Added Use PBR checkbox
Changes to mesh tab / proccesing:
Relocated Billboard Mode from Game Engine to here
Relocated most of material section to new panel in Materials tab
Remaining materials stuff now in ‘Baking Settings’ section. Added Force Baking checkbox to avoid multi-materials.
Blender’s mixed flat / smooth shading now supported, or custom split normals if used.
Custom properties Picking & Disabled are now using Outliner Icons instead.
Alpha now supported in vertex colors
Changes for lights tab / proccessing:
Added PBR intensity mode custom property. When Automatic or not PBR, intensity scaled 0-1 from Blender’s Energy, where 10 is 1. Otherwise Energy passed, unmodified.
Range property now supported using Blender property Radius
Hemi light type is no longer supported. To get a BJS hemi light use area type, & specify Size X for range.
Added new custom properties panel for Materials:
Relocated Back Face Culling checkbox from Game Engine to here
Relocated Check Ready Only Once checkbox from Mesh tab to here
Relocated Max Simultaneous Lights from Mesh tab to here
Relocated Name Space from Mesh tab to here (might be in TOB only, since JSON files cannot share materials)
Mesh baking can be reduced to only the texture channels required, keeping other image texture based channels (not for multi-material meshes)
Nodes based renders (Cycles & eevee) not always just baked. See chart for properties / textures & where values are from. Properties are only assigned when no texture input to socket.
STD Property / Tex
PBR Property / Tex
From Nodes-Socket
diffuseColor / diffuseTexture
albedoColor / albedoTexture
Diffuse BSDF - Color, Principled BSDF - Base Color
Diffuse BSDF - Color, Transparency BSDF - Color, Principled BSDF - Base Color
bumpTexture
bumpTexture
Normal Map - Color, Principled BSDF - Normal
Certain nodes are allowed, and are either ignored or just passed thru
Mix Shader, used mostly for non-principled trees
Separate RGB, for metallic textures wt roughness / AO
Frensel, when not PBR
glTF legacy nodes (glTF Metallic Roughness or glTF Specular Glossiness) produce an error saying to switch to standard Blender nodes or use glTF exporter
Texture / UV parameters are optional Nodes, when input to a texture node (ignored when must be baked, baking uses them though)
Mapping node for (translation to offset), (rotation to ang), (scale to scale)
Texture Coordinate & UVMap nodes for coordinatesIndex
When a material channel cannot really be represented by mapping, then it will be baked. Examples:
A Noise or other procedureal texture to Principled BSDF - Normal, then a bump texture will be baked
Any node which is not explicitly supported or ignored
Ho sounds really great,
I need to test with the gltf export, if it’s now possible to bake shadows in blender for an already existing babylon scene and reexport them to babylon after.
Problem is that EEVEE does NOT support baking. When the exporter does have to bake materials (hopefully not often, though you can do some really cool stuff putting Magic Texture on the diffuse channel), it temporarily switches to the Cycles engine.
If there was a way to cast a shadow using Cycles (probably), you could bake the shadows into the materials yourself, or you can force the materials of a mesh which receive a shadow to be baked during export, using properties highlighted above in Blue.
I have not found dynamic shadows to be a real drain. I did one scene where at the end 94 dynamic shadows were use. The scene did not die, on a desktop, at least.
A reflectionProbe can be inside a .babylon file, but unless there is some Blender object it can be associated with, it would have to be done completely with custom properties. So no, they are not exported.
ShadowGenerators are combined with a light with a few extra properties.
Once a mesh is imported, it is just like any other mesh. If you need to actually use a mesh as an argument to something, just query it by the name you gave it in Blender.
I do not know. Make a simple PG & posting to your own topic is what I would recommend, since this really has nothing to do with Blender. I rarely look at 3DS Max topics. The people who look here, may not know.
As far as keeping old docs, it is alright by me. Think you have a typo. Should probably 2.80 or later.
Yes, lights are exported. There are a number of changes highlighted by topic referenced at the top. Light exports vary by whether PBR or STD. Also, lights brought in by Append are not going to be right, especially former Hemi lights. Create a new Area light for a Hemi.
I just tried to export a scene with a camera, a light and a bezier curve (I wanted to check if your exporter can export bezier curve); however it seems that the exporter is unhappy about the default camera.
The answer to the export of curves is no. I am not even aware of a BJS equivalent that is also serializable. Any such objects will get the followinf entry in the export log file: WARNING: The following object (type - CURVE) is not currently exportable thus ignored: name here
On the error part, whoops. Another exporter which generates inline javascript instead of a JSON file has this as an option which is not available in the JSON exporter. Since I use the same .blend files to test both, the property was in all my .blends, even though it is ignored in the JSON exporter.
Will have a fix sometime today, basically a delete of one line & bumping the revision #.
… that’s a shame concerning the curves. I am not sure what you mean by serializable, I am sorry. I think I will try to export the parameters of my bezier curves and re-create them in BabylonJS with Curve3 (Draw Curves - Babylon.js Documentation).
EDIT: I tried to convert the curve into a mesh in blender and then export the file. Unfortunately, my mesh does not get exported (the babylon file is empty, see attachment below) and I get warnings (see exporter log attached).
I forgot that the math file had a BezierCurve.class. If you look there is no static parse method which FileLoader can call to get the values from the export file to an actual javascript object.
FYI, it would take a lot more than just adding a parse method, but when I see the lack of this, I know to stop. One of the strengths of the Javascript exporter is anything can be exported if it can be expressed as code from data available from the Blender side. However, I have no interest in adding this for now, and have not published it in quite a while.
As far as a curve converted to a mesh, the exporter does not actually export vertices. It exports faces, or groups of 3 vertices. When you convert the curve to a mesh, it creates some vertices, but no faces. Perhaps the “this is being ignored” message should say faces not vertices. Same problem with converting things like Hair particle systems. I have overcome this, but not without a lot of code on both sides. Not walking into this issue lightly again.
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