How to export models in Blender with its material and shaders?
I have this seamless tiling material in Blender but I want to simplify the process so I don’t have to bake the texture but instead just export the material and model from Blender to Babylon.
That way there is no need for the image to be so large and everything is produced by the material.
I think the goal is to use usd because it has support for scene graphs defined with materialx.
Also nvidia is all in on usd. They have a model management platform with a huge ecosystem of connectors that enable interop between apps. They have a ton of stuff available for free if you install the omniverse launcher
A couple years ago, we chatted with (I think it was) Autodesk about MaterialX after presenting about NME at a conference. I think it’s a good idea, but not sure when we can do it or how feasible it is.
I built an rpc system that was intended to submit machine learning models a couple years ago using storm diagrams as the gui. Perhaps i can be of help, idk. I implemented multi outputs , so that bit could be useful.
I will run some materialx files through a json converter and see how it compares. Its kind of hard to use the nme without a snippet file browser or something though
all i did was copy/pasted the raw glass matx definition, the matx defnition converted to json, and the playground’s nodeMaterial.json to compare the formats.
I just wanted to clarify, it seems like materialx is kind of a subspec usd. so all of these tools that have usd exports indirectly have materialx exporters. Although, that’s not a hard rule it seems to generally be the case. AMD’s blender addon that exports usd uses materialx. However, nvidia’s ecosystem seems to be using this .mdl format (which materialx can also convert to, in addition to osl, glsl ).
the main idea i think for babylon is to use the materialx lib to convert its xml into glsl and use it in the nme as custom shader blocks or directly with the engine. the hope is to enable exporting assets created using node graphs from blender / substance / autodesk apps / etc.
Maybe to sumarize my thoughts:
if using materialx in babylon would allow importing nodes from blender, continue exploring, otherwise its pointless. Is that a reasonable assessment?
update: feb10
this repo came up on my github feed and made me curious why would autodesk fork usd. They are making progress on js bindings in the hdJavascript branch