Wavefront OBJ Export: Auto-Bake procedural materials
Currently, the Wavefront OBJ exporter recognizes some material configurations and exports those to the corresponding .mtl file:
- Solid color
- Texture/Image
Procedural textures are not exported.
Exporting procedural textures manually means going through all objects, unwrapping UV, baking all channels, storing the images, and changing the material to use the image. This is lot of work for scenes with hundreds of objects - and tricky to get right when multiple objects share the same material.
Ideally, Blender would bake/rasterize procedural textures automatically during export.
The same functionality might be useful for other formats as well, or maybe even generally, for performance reasons.
3 Comments
this has nothing to do with exporting, let alone a specific exchange format.
It's merely asking for solutions to bake in bulk, about which I do believe this website and others to be already full of discussions, and to which plenty addons offer some solutions for.
I disagree: it has at least something to do with exporting. That's where I ran into the problem, and the problem which I think should be solved. In an ideal world, as a user I wouldn't have to look for a batch baking addon to have get textures in the exported files.
I've seen multiple posts from people having similar problems. Perhaps, "search, buy, install an addon, and run it manually before the export" might not be the ideal solution?
To clarify what I mean: let's make a comparison: much like texture baking, some people might need to bake animation keyframes at export. But most scenarios of animation baking are outside of exporting. Some scenarios might even never meet any keyframe animation export ever. Hence animation baking wasn't designed and brought in Blender as an export option, but as a general animatoin tool.
Then it's a nice addition to export options, to some degree. But foremost, it exists outside the export scenario, and with more controls. Whereas, the exporters' animation baking options are limited and tailored to the export scenario.
Thanks to that, you have two things: a powerful tool that you can use in many scenarios and maintain easily, and lighter integrations of it in other areas that might need it but in a more limited way.
As for solutions, I'd advise discussing them on the best existing proposal, more votes and discussion will make it more visible, and focusing the discussions in one place will make it also more refined and interesting, which both effects combined make a proposal more likely to hit the devs. Whereas posting yet another duplicate proposal rarely brings more visibility to a subject, but instead creates increasingly opaque noise where it gets ever harder to have a nice proposal spear its way through.