Building upon the official glTF importer instead

[bestdani]

It might be better to build upon the official glTF importer if there is a way to support the very special usage of primitive loading with the Asobo extensions for mesh and UV data loading.

In a perfect world this importer extension would then just have to care about loading the meshes with UV maps as well as converting textures to load them into blender and the rest (animations, bones, and so one) would work with the same quality the official importer provides.

If someone has experience with this already I would appreciate any pointers that could help to speed things up if I or someone else decides to convert it to some proper glTF importer extension plugin.

[adenflorian]

I'm interested in helping, I'll take a look at that importer today. You can add me on discord to help us stay in sync if you want AdenFlorian#8934

[VitusW42]

Hey man, I'm the author of the Blender2MSFS toolkit. That toolkit utilizes the Khronos glTF2 exporter/importer. Since that exporter already has almost all bells and whistles for export and import, there's no need to re-invent the wheel.
There are a couple of issues importing the msfs glTFs though, which you must already be aware of. Asobo is using a lot of extensions and extras to work with their engine. Especially when it comes to materials, it's important to understand what all those extensions do. The tricky part for you is that ultimately you need to translate those Extensions back into a shader-node tree in Blender. Ideally, you'd keep compatibility to my addon by utilizing the functions provided for that.
The importer has never been very high up on my list, since I'm more interested in creation, rather than modification. It also comes with some moral responsibility - since it opens the door for plagiarism.

My suggestion would be that you use the Blender2MSFS toolkit as a starting point, that way half of your work is already done. Let me know if you need some info on it.

[adenflorian]

Also, FYI, my goals/needs for the importer is to be able to import a vanilla plane from the game, make modifications, export it, and be able to use it in a mod (FBW A32NX). I understand that these might not be your goals, so I'll fork once necessary 🙂.

[adenflorian]

FYI, my fork of the official importer/exporter is mostly complete for the importer part, including bones, skinned meshes, and animations. there's a couple skinned mesh positioning issues left, but it only affects a couple things that are easy to manually fix (i do plan to fix them in the importer though). I'm currently working on the exporter part as well.
https://github.com/AdenFlorian/glTF-Blender-IO-a32nx

[tracernz]

@adenflorian Just to confirm, you’re aware of the MSFSToolkit exporter built on the Kronos code?

[adenflorian]

@tracernz I tried it a while ago and didn't seem to work for a vanilla plane, but ill try again when i work more on the exporter.