[x3d-public] X3D minutes 20 MAR 2020: COVID, X3D Ontology, PBR, Xj3D, Blender and MeshLab, CollisionCollection, IFS in CADInterchange, CORS

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Don Brutzman <brutzman at nps.edu> wrote:
> Michalis you have been posting fixes, how do you think we might best coordinate and proceed?

Right now I'm simply waiting for Blender devs to accept my fixes. They
are visible publicly on

https://developer.blender.org/T74934
https://developer.blender.org/D7183
https://developer.blender.org/D7186

I'll ping Blender developers to review + apply them in a few days, if
nothing happens.

Until then, anyone can try my fixes by applying them manually. You can
get latest Blender 2.82a from https://www.blender.org/ , and apply the
change from https://developer.blender.org/D7183 and
https://developer.blender.org/D7186 manually to your X3D exporter in
...../blender/2.82/scripts/addons/io_scene_x3d/export_x3d.py file.

I do not have immediate plans to do more work on Blender X3D exporter
myself. If anybody here is interested in working on Blender X3D
exporter, I can offer a helping hand :) Just speak up on x3d-public
mailing list.

At this point, the Blender X3D exporter is so much lacking in features
(e.g. compared to glTF exporter) that I'll just advise every Castle
Game Engine user to export from Blender to glTF instead. glTF exporter
is very actively maintained, and it supports PBR, with all textures
(base, normal...) and animations. Right now, X3D exporter doesn't
support PBR, doesn't support textures (even exporting
Apperance.texture for Phong diffuse is broken now, it used to work in
Blender 2.7) and it has no animations.

I may want to submit enhancements to enable PBR/normalmaps/etc. in
Blender X3D exporter... but for this, X3D v4 draft (with my PBR
changes) should be public, since general public (including Blender
developers) currently don't have access to it, so it would be
impossible to review correctness.

P.S. I also submitted a pull request to glTF exporter this week,
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-IO/pull/991 . It was a
busy week :)

Regards,
Michalis