Unofficial Offline Material Editor

Howdy Guys, first post here!

I’ve been investigating using PlayCanvas recently, and really like what I see. One thing that I am not so fond on is the lack of off-line editing attributes (my internet connection is terrible, so the less I do online, the better. Also the workflow requiring upload/download isn’t that great.)

There are two or three things I’d like to see offline:

  1. Model export
  2. Material Editing

So I picked the second, simpler one and wrote a script to do it. It’s written in python3 (as that is my go-to-language of choice), and allows editing, well, as far as I can tell, everything. There’s no preview and the interface is just in TK, but it may be useful to some other people as well. You’ll need python3 and the python3-tk package. I wrote it/tested it on Linux Mint, but it should work on any platform that Python3 runs on.

The biggest limitation is that you can’t add attributes. So if you have a simple material (ie just plain specular/diffuse) you can’t add image maps because the file never had them in the first place.

Here it is, in all it’s undocumented glory:
Google Docs Link

After writing this script, I realized a better thing to do would be to grab a full-materialized object (to use as a template material) and write a javascript/html page where I could:

  • Select an asset
  • List materials within it
  • Edit/preview those values

Maybe when I have another weekend to spare.
I’d also like to write a model exporter from blender some time, but I haven’t come across any documentation, and my reverse engineering skills may not be up to it.

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