Blender Cycles & Babylon workflow

[V!nc3r]

Hi all ! (first post in this forum)

I know that the exporter works great with blender render materials, but cycles is so powerfull that i want to use it rather than blender render.

I've search but don't find any doc where cycles is the render engine, but i found this line in the babylon what's new :

Quote

Blender can now bake Procedural textures & Cycles materials. Plus more. See documentation here (Palmer-JC)

But the documentation is just a list of features compatibility, and the link to TowerOfBabel (which i suppose is a different exporter plugin ?) is dead

If i do a simple scene (one camera, on light, one plane with one material, this is what i get :

 

So here are my questions :

• Is anyone using cycles & babylon ? If yes, what is the basic workflow ?
• If the exporter doesn't support yet Cycles, do you know if it is planned ? (it will be very great, especially when you think that the conversion of materials could be set to PBR )

Thanks for your answers, and sorry for my english.

[GameMonetize]

@JCPalmeris the author of the Cycle render support.

[JCPalmer]

First, does not matter how powerful Cycles is, if you can do it with the Blender render, do so.  That render maps much better to BJS.

Essentially for cycles, the exporter just does the last bake as the export progresses.  Saves you the task, and lets you still change your material for future exports.

Gratuitous use of Cycles has consequences:

• You now have a texture file which needs to be downloaded, & UV for the mesh
• This makes the material only usable for 1 mesh

If you just have a diffuse node, doing no point to use Cycles.  You can mix Cycles - Blender renders in same scene, just not the same mesh.  If you had 10 meshes with the same cycles material, you are far better of baking it yourself. 

Cycles PBR is not currently mapped to BJS PBR.  I really do not know enough to do that.  Since I have no need right now, it is not a priority for me.

Tower of Babel has moved in repository.  It's documentation moved with it.

[V!nc3r]

Ok, thanks for this clarification, and for the doc link.

About Cycles, on graphical point on view, I don't think that is a gratuitous use You can do so quickly, accurate and better renders with it, compare to classic blender render.

For comparison, I currently use 3dsmax & vray at work, not the 3dsmax scanline renderer (no way ! ). I apply standard materials on my objects of course, but all my lighting is done with vray (with VrayMaterial override during render). I want to switch to blender, but i need to find how to bake a cycles lighting and be able to export to BJS. If i find a workflow, i will share it here.

I will try Tower of babel exporter soon, thanks !

[JCPalmer]

I view Blender as a BablyonJS input tool, not as a standalone tool.  I know very little about 3dsmax, nor what vray or scanline even are.  But if the way scanline described their data structures meant that it transferred to BJS the best, then they are the best for BJS.

You really need to decide what your final product is.  If it is Blender scene displayed in webGL, then Blend4Web will let you use most anything that could be done in Blender.  BabylonJS is very gaming / performance oriented, using other input programs to map content into it via export.  As a gaming platform Blend4Web is not proven to me.  A game used in a talk at their recent conference, Petigor's Tale, was still loading @ 35% complete after 8 minutes when I gave up.

I think you are better staying with the .babylon file exporter over the Tower of Babel exporter (inline JS generator) right now.  TOB is the one with actual documentation that shows how the mapping works though.  Good luck.

[V!nc3r]

A workflow for easily switching from cycles to bi is doable !

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58589/share-object-data-between-two-scenes-but-no-materials/58591

Test scene here : https://www.nothing-is-3d.com/dl/cycles_for_baking_BI_for_export.7z

[Nabroski]

a question what you are get used to.

i go to file, select link[blenderfile], chose the object(material,mesh, etc), i what to link and then press L on my keyboard. 

does the same thing.