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I tried Godot for an art-pipeline tool (batch animating models in code & converting to optimised gLTF on a huge scale) - I was amazed actually coming from a Uni

I tried Godot for an art-pipeline tool (batch animating models in code & converting to optimised gLTF on a huge scale) - I was amazed actually coming from a Unity background, in fact it was the only tool that could do the job reliably (even ThreeJS didn't work - thanks GLTF standards ;-)

firtoz 3y ago
Can you go into a bit of detail please, or do you have a blog post about it perhaps?
- appstorelottery 3y ago
  Lol, no blog post. It was quite simple, various models were imported and parts on these models needed to be rotated over a number of frames, this constituted an animation which was then saved in GLTF format. There were 1000 animations with different rotation end points for a large number of models. The program was very simple to achieve the output and took me only a few hours to (a) understand how to do it in Godot and (b) write the code, which was remarkable to me. I'd tried for perhaps a day or two searching for solutions in ThreeJS - found bugs in the GLTF exporter, posted to the DRI, back and forth etc. Godot just worked.
  - firtoz 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing!
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    interesting. So in this case did you output your scene as a single gltf file, or were the assets split out individually? Or does this distinction not matter much for gltf to begin with? gltf sounds like a very interesting file format for games, but so much of popular modeling formats veer towards singular assets and leaving scene management to the engine. It'd be a dream if I could have a seemless two-way workflow throwing my blender scenes into an engine and vice versa, each tool able to mutate the scene file as needed.
    - appstorelottery 3y ago
      GLTF is a very interesting format, it's a single file that can contain mesh, texture and animation data. In the case I wrote about single assets were created for each case, but it also could have been done combining all assets in a single file. The problem with GLTF (at least a few months ago) is that many importers or exporters in various libraries that roll their own aren't 100% compliant to the standard. Thankfully the Chronos group has a validator - and I've been vocal in reporting bugs to the various vendors in our art-pipeline toolchain (nearly all of them had various edge cases where they weren't 100% standards compliant). We were a case where we were using a lot of the functionality GLTF provides. Blender has good GLTF support and was a part of our pipeline as well - automated renders etc.

firtoz 3y ago

Can you go into a bit of detail please, or do you have a blog post about it perhaps?

appstorelottery 3y ago
Lol, no blog post. It was quite simple, various models were imported and parts on these models needed to be rotated over a number of frames, this constituted an animation which was then saved in GLTF format. There were 1000 animations with different rotation end points for a large number of models. The program was very simple to achieve the output and took me only a few hours to (a) understand how to do it in Godot and (b) write the code, which was remarkable to me. I'd tried for perhaps a day or two searching for solutions in ThreeJS - found bugs in the GLTF exporter, posted to the DRI, back and forth etc. Godot just worked.
- firtoz 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing!
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  interesting. So in this case did you output your scene as a single gltf file, or were the assets split out individually? Or does this distinction not matter much for gltf to begin with? gltf sounds like a very interesting file format for games, but so much of popular modeling formats veer towards singular assets and leaving scene management to the engine. It'd be a dream if I could have a seemless two-way workflow throwing my blender scenes into an engine and vice versa, each tool able to mutate the scene file as needed.
  - appstorelottery 3y ago
    GLTF is a very interesting format, it's a single file that can contain mesh, texture and animation data. In the case I wrote about single assets were created for each case, but it also could have been done combining all assets in a single file. The problem with GLTF (at least a few months ago) is that many importers or exporters in various libraries that roll their own aren't 100% compliant to the standard. Thankfully the Chronos group has a validator - and I've been vocal in reporting bugs to the various vendors in our art-pipeline toolchain (nearly all of them had various edge cases where they weren't 100% standards compliant). We were a case where we were using a lot of the functionality GLTF provides. Blender has good GLTF support and was a part of our pipeline as well - automated renders etc.