Better Blender Cycles Integration?

[jemonn]

I've been trying to use Blender and Babylon together, and exporting itself is fine (I wish the Tower of Babylon exporter would let you choose what file to export as so you didn't have to delete the others all the time though), but the workflow in Blender itself is quite messy when using Cycles to bake textures, however I've got an idea that seems like it could be plausible.

 

In Cycles, baking takes place in the node system:

 

 

The highlighted node (the last one selected) is the one that Cycles bakes to, so if you can detect that node, you have the baked texture. You could then export this image as the texture hooked up to a basic material (if you're baking your textures, I think we can assume you won't need to change much on the base material?)

 

This would save time having to switch from Cycles to Blender Internal, re-setting up the materials, setting up textures then exporting. 

 

A couple of other things that would be nice in the exporter would be being able to assign a shader material in Blender, instead of having to search through all materials on load and re-assign them, and a way to turn down the opacity of a texture (I must be missing something here - but whenever I try to do it with a shadow map (black -> in shadow; white -> in light), changing the colour value under influences in textures seems to affect the alpha of the mesh instead of the opacity of the texture)

[JCPalmer]

Look down in the lower left corner when exporting.  There are check boxes to select the files you want. If not, get version 1.0.1 .  I do not know enough about cycles right now to comment on the rest.