Node Assets — requesting feedback & discussion

Questions
1

We hear how difficult it can be to get your 3D assets ready for the web. Between converting file formats, cleaning up messy models, and optimizing for the web, pre-processing assets often requires some combination of scripts, CLIs, GUIs, or import-export roundtrips through DCC tools.

We’ve been exploring ways to make that easier.

I want to share a prototype of a concept I’ve dubbed Node Assets: a composable pipeline to help you turn source files into Babylon-ready outputs before you ship.

It’s designed for build-time asset pipelines and focuses on 2 core job families:

  • Converting between formats — e.g., Import FBX -> Export glTF
  • Optimizing for the web — e.g., Simplify Meshes -> Resize Textures -> KTX2 -> Draco

To make this concrete, here’s a rough, visual proof-of-concept called the Node Assets Editor (NAE)

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You can mess around with it here: Babylon.js Node Assets Editor. Included are some sample use cases — open the library to find them.

We’d love to know: would you find this useful? Why or why not? All thoughts are welcome! :slight_smile:

2

While Babylon.js has always been renowned for its extensive and helpful documentation, for some reason, anything Node-related is almost entirely undocumented. It’s as if it’s implied that these are self-evident matters we absorb with our mother’s milk. :slight_smile:

Of course, Node Assets Editor is still just a prototype for now, but would it be a bad idea to ask an agent to provide brief textual explanations for each block?

3

I also would recommend to switch from ktx2-encoder to babylonpress-ktx2-encoder - it is several times faster for GLB models with more than 1 texture.

npm i babylonpress-ktx2-encoder

For benchmarks, API and other info see glb-optimizer-v2/packages/babylonpress-ktx2-encoder at master · eldinor/glb-optimizer-v2 · GitHub

4

Possibly an uncommon use case, but there’s some situations in which I prefer to assign materials dynamically, which means any default materials and textures assigned to a loaded asset are just bloating the file size and extending download time, so it’d be nice to have a “Strip materials” (unsure what to call it) option that strips the heavy materials and textures but retains material slots/UV channels etc.

5

Along with build-time, an option to use an NAE pipeline in browser (run time), making use of worker threads, would help several use cases without adding a server round trip:

  1. online assets
  2. in-browser procedurally-generated assets
  3. uploadable assets

I know this is a pretty big ask, though.

6

From the perspective of a gaming project: no, not really.

I use Blender for animations, model design, some material designs and some image generation. With the Blender python api (BPY) I have access to all of Blender’s feature set. Since design and automation live in Blender it is all perfectly aligned. I do not see any point in bringing in another tool into the pipeline. Particularly so since I do not see any feature of NAE which Blender does not provide already.

Hope this post is alright. Do not want to be negative but I sort of have to in order to express my perspective :shaking_face:

And what @labris said about the documentation :grin:

7

The main difference is that NAE does it in browser. It matters.