I’ve got a 3d scene that I’m trying to export using the Babylon.js exporter; however I’m running into this issue:
Exporter version: 2.93.4, Blender version: 2.93.3
========= Conversion from Blender to Babylon.js =========
Scene settings used :
Inline textures : false
Material Type : PBR
Positions Precision : 4
Normals Precision : 3
UVs Precision : 3
Vert Color Precision: 3
Mat Weight Precision: 2
Keep Z-up r-handed : no
Texture directory : C:\Users\Mics\Desktop\house\
Python World class constructor completed
WARNING: No active camera has been assigned, or is not in a currently enabled collection
processing begun of mesh: building_03.001
processing begun of material: material-env-project
ERROR: UN-EXCEPTED NODE TYPE(SHADERNODENORMALMAP). CANNOT CONTINUE.
processing texture Nizar_Ztn_Palette_256_Gradient
texture type: diffuseTexture, mapped using: "uv1"
bake time: 0 min, 0.008 secs
Custom split normals with tangents being used
num positions : 18784
num normals : 18784
num tangents : 75136
num uvs : 37568
num uvs2 : 0
num colors : 0
num triangles : 7616
Output cancelled due to data error
========= end of processing =========
elapsed time: 0 min, 0.3642 secs
If I do as the above thread seems to suggest and change the “Normal” property value from “Normal/Map” to “Default” (which also removes the “Normal/Map” box from the Shader Editor chart above), the Babylon.js exporter works.
Just wondering:
what exactly is this “Normal” property? changing it from “Normal/Map” to “Default” didn’t seem to have any visual impact on the exported model from what I could tell.
is it a bug in the Babylon.js exporter that it can’t handle the “Normal: Normal/Map” case? could this be fixed?
cc @JCPalmer hope you don’t mind me pinging you - from my understanding you’re the owner of the exporter, would love some advice here, thanks
My guess, confirmed after a quick try, is that the exporter expect a texture after a NormalMap node. Here in your material you don’t have a normal map, so basically just delete the NormalMap node and it should be fine.
Well, some times things go wrong when playing with switches you do not understand. A normal in general is a value from 0-1. How it relates to geometry (ignoring flat shading) is there are 3 normal values (x, y, z) for each vertex, which tell what direction is “out” or “front”. So for these pair of pants there is a 3 element normal for each vertex in the geometry area.
As far as to normals being part of a material, your situation, sometimes you may want additional info like winkles, but not have to pay for it with additional geometry. You can specify a texture which has very high grained normals, encoded as colors, which are applied just like other textures are in the fragment shader of a material. Here is the normal texture for geo above. It does not look like much but does give an more embossed look.
Act of exporting as it relates to material is kind of like a scavenger hunt. The exporter traverses the node tree, and finds things which can be translated into an exported material. There are many types of Blender nodes which have no equivalent, e.g. Glass, Magic. In cases like this, the exporter attempts to bake the result of the material into a texture.
For this, it does look like there was a slight over reaction. The material went on to bake a diffuse texture. Just before the output generation pass though, a check for any errors got the process to self terminate. Deleting the node was the right answer though.
I will revisit this for the next LTS release, 3.03.0. Perhaps a more tolerant approach is do-able. Since 3.0 has still not arrived, that may be longer than May for the next LTS.
View that statement in terms of the post about danger. No danger = limited upside, so no defense required.
Also, I really have to admit that I knew you did not do this model. No one who did custom split normals in Blender would ask what normals are. That is pretty advanced.
