PlayCanvas - Supported 3D Formats
PlayCanvas supports these following 3D file formats.
FBX, OBJ, 3DS and COLLADA (DAE)
Exporting Assets | Learn PlayCanvas
And also the JSON format, which PlayCanvas has depreciated, but is still supported and working for the time being.
How to export Blender models to PlayCanvas
If you choose to use Blender as your 3D asset creation chose, please be aware that choosing Render Engines make a big difference. Here are main rendering engines that Blender has:
Blender Render (DEPRECATED)
Also known as Blender Internal, this rendering is now deprecated but can still be used in older versions if you still wish to download it. It has a limited and vastly oudated. It supports Material/Texture baking.
Cycles
A vast supply of Material Nodes, this rendering engine aims for photorealism. It uses Ray-Tracing and is slower than EEVEE, but respectfully produces better graphics than the EEVEE engine. It supports Texture/Material baking.
Note: You cannot export most Material Nodes except basic ones like Diffuse or PBR nodes.
EEVEE
Using Approximate Ray-Tracing, this rendering engine produces good graphics but at a more decent performance, but at the cost of producing slightly less accurate results.
Note: You cannot export most Material Nodes except basic ones like Diffuse or PBR nodes.
How to export FBX with texture-embedding
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Create a new blank image in the Image Editor
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Select the desired object to be exported and go into Edit-Mode and do the operation UV Unwrap to your entire whole mesh. The hotkey for UV Unwrap is the: [P] key.
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With your desired object, create and properly setup a: UV Map + Image node combination in the Shader Editor for all the materials. Your setup should look like the lower-portion of the node setup in the screenshot below.
Note: You only need to implement the upper-portion of the node setup in the screenshot if you are going to be baking - if not, just ignore it.
Additional FBX Texture-Embed Requirements
If you wish to embed image textures inside your exported FBX file, and you have properly setup the required node structure. You can embed the image textures by turning on the: Copy + Embed Textures settings.
You’re Not Required To Pack
You are not required to pack your textures. Exported models search for texture file-paths in the same path as they do in Blender.
So if you used a directory structure locally with Blender such as this:
Blender
Models
Textures
You can simple recreate the file directories in PlayCanvas and the exported model should find the correct textures, provided that they’re uploaded - Separately.
Additional Steps For GLB Formats
- Enable file compression (there usually isn’t any side affects).
- Disable any or all exporting of animation types if you don’t need or don’t use them:
