Any Possibility for implementing Nvidia's MDL specification for CYCLES and EEVEE?
Purely on a discussion standpoint SDK: developer.nvidia.com/mdl-sdk
Specification : developer.download.nvidia.com/designworks/mdl-sdk/secure/MDL_spec_1.3.2_16Sep2016.pdf
12 Comments
Maybe this shed some light over here:
twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1029752422485254144
@n3bb3z4r: I guess that means that it can actually happen one day. Not a clue about the tech side but it would be awesome.
In combination with USD Export and Unreal Engine USD, this will be so useful.
Currently, Blender USD Export exporting no MDL Materials and also the PBR Pipeline with Principled BSDF, not including any textures in USD. In FBX this is working but in USD not.
MDL Material support can fix this issue :)
Having this feature will be extremely useful for certain users. There are people who import 3d scene with Iray materials (i.e. Daz studio users) and use Cycles for rendering. The major pain point for doing the above atm is having to tweak Cycles materials to look like in Iray. If this pain point is removed by allowing Iray's MDL materials to seamlessly work in Cycles, this would open up new user base for Blender Cycles. Here's a thread where people showed interest daz3d.com/forums/discussion/367571/what-if-blender-could-seamlessly-render-iray-materials
I hope in 2.8's assets manager they will use a standard preview model like the B.M.P.S model
.....
I was wondering if this brings anything to Blender other than a library of materials.
@luisburdallo: I think of it more as a standard way of defining materials perhaps or even for export. For eg: exporting cycles materials to Iray or Vray renders
@m.antony: Ok I get the point now. It would be amazing if the materials could be exchanged between different applications. It's actually a great idea but only a dev could tell if there is anything negative about it. I think they were working on a library system? I hope they are because it's actually one of the most shocking facts in Blender. How would all nodes and complex networks be supported using MDL? If all different applications don't have the same nodes and options it would be useless unless it's just for simple materials which MDL sounds like it is but honestly, I don't have much idea about it. Even tho it sounds interesting.
it would be great to have material x too for exchanging material between applications ! materialx.org/
@luisburdallo: Yea the development is gona be hard. One has to sit down and read the whole MDL spec and then write a interface for existing cycles materials. Definitely has to be a dev who is very familiar with cycle's materials.
@martin.bailly19: This. ^
I think the devs need to have a discussion with the community regarding this. If it is even viable or useful. Implementing this seems like a lot of work and feels a bit unfair to expect the devs to do this, especially for open source.