Lucasfilm and ILM have just released the first iteration of the open source MaterialX library. As described on the website “MaterialX is an open standard for transfer of rich material and look development content between applications and renderers.” It is being released under a modified Apache license. You can find out more on the MaterialX website here http://www.materialx.org/.
Personally I’m very excited for this since both Autodesk and The Foundry have pledged support for it. Hopefully Blender can implement it in the future.
Thank you for the info, both of you. So as far as I understand it, an importer script would just need to do the conversion from MaterialX to OSL and create a new OSL Shader Block in Blender?
How would an exporter from Blender to MaterialX work, if there is no OSL in between? For this case, I suppose the specification needs to be read and implemented thorougly (as usual)?!
The referenced pull request on GitHub doesn’t build at the time of my writing unfortunately, but it is very nice to see that people are so fast at adopting the new standard. I am sure Blender will have this in very fast as well.
Do you think this will be the ultimate exchange format? Is alembic in Blender working well between packages? What are your experiences? I am a bit unsure, I think there have already been attempts to unifiying 3D data even before alembic or MaterialX, or am I mistaken?