(2020-03-04, 10:39)Nicolas Wrote: Hello, I am the Mecabricks guy
If you want to get in touch with me, I could answer your Blender questions I saw in this thread. However, I can already tell you that if you want to get photorealistic results, you will have to write your own addon for Blender in order to build your specialised materials for the built in renderers (Cycles/Eevee). Generic formats like collada can only output generic materials. In the case of Blender, it is basically the principled shader with default settings. Besides as you already found out, you do not have a great control over how material and mesh data are structured which has a great impact on the render time and memory used.
Thanks,
I already discovered some major downsides to the collada format and especially how Blender imports them (I suspect they don't fully follow the spec on some things).
But all in all I'm quite happy with the result it gives, I love that default 'milky' look cycles generates even with the default materials.
The main reason I hope to avoid writing a blender plugin is it would mean I have to basically rewrite the animation interpretation code in python.
I'm considering a small plugin which would post process the materials and lighting though, I would like some pointers on that some day if you don't mind.