[X3D-Ecosystem] Initial work on PhysicalMaterial support in Blender

[Vincent Marchetti]

I’ve posted a webpage on some initial work:

https://www.kshell.com/pages/physbasedrender/normalmap/index.html 

The page includes links to 3D visualizations using the PhysicalMaterial node.

From the page…

This page presents early-stage work for directly exporting the X3D V4 PhysicalMaterial node from Blender. There is an existing two-step export and conversion based on current implementations of Blender (and the Blender glTF import/export extension ) and Castle Game Engine to performing this conversion.

The example material shown here is intended to represent brass metal (by choice of base color , metallic, and roughness values ), and a normal map defined by a texture to give the visual appearance of indentations ("dimples") in the metal. For simplicity texture-based blending of the base color , metallic, roughness are not tested with this example.

Initial results:
    • The two-step process, along with some manual editing, yields an X3D file that passes current X3D V4 validation
    • The resulting file, along with X3DOM variant described below, give equivalent visualizations in three X3D viewers
    • Reminded that X3DOM uses different names for some of the fields of the PhysicalMaterial node.

Vince Marchetti