It is hard to get models out of Blender into Godot (correctly and without loosing half the work).
Gamedev relevant open-source projects should come together to create a new 3D interchange format. More in the GitHub discussion.
I’ve submitted this proposal to other open source projects as well:
Behind the scenes, Godot uses Blender to export your ‘.blend’ file into glTF 2.0. It doesn’t support keyframe tangents, animating anything beyond transforms and blendshapes. Among many many other issues if you look at glTF in an interchange context. I’ve written that down in way more detail here: https://gist.github.com/emperorofmars/d8abf0f4b9bd5434f9543511b243a254
In Blender, right now, you can’t export animations that target anything other than transforms. (I am aware of the two hacks to allow you to also export blendshape animations). Blender 4.4 will get a new animation system, which fixes that part. But you still can’t export your animations properly, it will force bake them.
Way more than animations go into 3d assets, it’s just the most broken part right now. An extension system would be rather nice, or a material system that doesn’t hard define a small set of properties^^
Can 3D substitution* animation be exported from Blender? This isn’t easy to search, though what I could find seems like importing animations in general needs more clicks than expected. Even better would be a workflow with greasepencil and geometry nodes (though searching w/Godot leads to a paid tool), especially if that can also be used for vertex colors.
I have my doubts here as the first thing I tried (a custom shader with a 2nd vertex color map hooked up to glow) didn’t work. Though I’m not sure if that was an issue with gltf, Blender, Godot, how I exported it, or something else.
*= Switching visibility to another model rather than using deformation or texturing. If this does not export easily, I guess it’d be easy enough to manually do with Godot’s animation player so long as there aren’t too many frames/animations/states.
