As a specification of one project, my colleague @joie and I are both in the need of have a NME material exported by means of the GLTF2 exporter. That exported model will be shown then to the user in AR via Google’s model-viewer.
The case is that I think that thing is probably not possible, due to the same nature of such kind of NME materials. Please take a look at this playground in order to have a more specific idea of the problem here. As you can see, the exported file only has assigned the non NME material.
The process is flawless with PBR or Standard materials, but sadly, I require instead triplanar PBR materials, what I think are only available using the aforementioned NME functionality, as stated in this other thread of the forum.
About your second question, the webapp part of the project is well covered with BabylonJS.
Is when passing to AR, where we prefer the “model-viewer” way. As you know model-viewer offers also WebXR (webxr mode) as a way to drive the AR experience, and yes, it is more flexible about customization, a basic GUI, …; but at the end of the day, the native performance (ar mode) is better by far.
Here the people making “the HW specifications” call all the shots, I’m afraid.
And furthermore, you have the problem with Safari making “apple” things (and FF also here):