[Bf-committers] Materials Library for Blender

[Campbell Barton]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Gaia <gaia.clary at machinimatrix.org> wrote:
> I know that many people really hate it,  but ...
> what about using Collada as format ?
> That could possibly have a few advantages...
>
> * It IS a standard, even if everybody hates its
>    versatility. ok,ok, that's the problem, i know...
> * We could in theory exchange materials with other tools.
> * The Collada exporter/importer in Blender needs to be
>    improved for material support anyways, so we could
>    directly make it perfect for both purposes (generic
>    collada import/export and assets library)
> * Regarding general assets (light,meshes,objects...)
>    this would also be doablewith Collada.
>
> We probably would need to improve the
> "Blender Collada profile"to support all we need.
> Actually exactly THAT willbe done anyways when we
> want to get full supportfor materials and light
> with the collada exporter.
>
> So why not just combine efforts ?
> just a thought...
>
> -gaia-

The problem would be we would only be able to write generic settings
into Collada if we want other applications to read it.

After that we can extend it with a blender profile - but for materials
at least, so much of the information that makes the material
interesting would end up in our profile that we would basically be
defining our own format within collada, On top of that we would have
to manage format versioning. So at that point we probably are better
off just using blend files (since we already manage versioning there).

For mesh data some generic format makes more sense but for materials
(especially node trees), I don't think it would work well.