Future support of glTF 2.1

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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Hi,

I have seen that glTF with version 2.0 is in maintenance mode:

[Content removed]

Now glTF 2.1 was announced and I am wondering if it could be supported in the future:

Best regards,

Jan.

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Steps to Reproduce
See description.

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Hello Jan,

at the moment we are monitoring the extensions to see if usage of glTF with those new features is going up.

As the announcement is quite recent, I expect the uptake to be slow and it is not yet a high priority for us.

When we will work to add coverage we will do it incrementally, thus I would love to understand what are your use cases and plans:

  • last time I check the gltf 2.1 specs adds around 15 features. Is there any you see as high priorities for your uses cases?
  • would you need us to support those new features for import or export from Unreal?
  • Do you already have 3ds softwares supporting gltf 2.1? Which tools and to which extend?

Thank you.

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Hi Flavien,

thank you very much for your answer.

We are currently exploring the usage of gltfs. We have a model which is switchable with the Variant Manager. All variant options geometry are exported as gltfs. It seems to work fine at the moment for our use cases. The only disadvantage which we have to solve later in our pipeline is, that the gltfs cannot share a material library. We are using the export material variants function which creates a lot of duplicates when bringing all gltfs back together.

So the “Complexe Scene” feature sounds quite handy here for using such referencing. But I can also imagine that it is not so easy to be implemented as the scene needs to be setup in a certain way in that case. E.g. how to tell the exporter that there is a material library to be created.

So for the short term I would like to see that the “Quality of life” improvements would be implemented first. Like webp support.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/issues/2585

We curently only need the support for export from Unreal. We are only using it in our Unreal pipeline and not in 3ds software.

Thanks again for having a look into this.

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Thank you for the details Jan.

When you import you can ask Unreal to try to reuse existing material and then you have some options to control where the engine will search for replacement.

That should work if you put materials in a subfolder of a folder that is sharing the same parent than where you are performing the import.

Is it something you tried already? Would that work for your use case.

gltf-shoe.png
gltf-shoe.png993×438 28.4 KB

I did a test and I had one issue: the gltf exporter added a suffix to the material name in my glTF, so when reimporting UE could not find the matching material. I could not reproduce that on all my tests. Is it something you notice on your side?

I will report that internally.

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Hi Flavien,

thanks for the tipps for importing to Unreal. Currently I guess we do not need to reimport again but good to know how it can work if we ever need it.

Correct material naming is always a good thing. :slight_smile: