My current workflow involves a BlenderPy script that applies basic textures to my meshes using materials from the NVIDIA vMaterials library, which includes diffuse images, normal images, roughness images, metallic images, and more.
Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that this script completely ignores the shading instructions defined in the NVIDIA Material Design Language (MDL) scripts that are attached to the texture maps. As a result, my rendered outputs lack realism.
I’m now on the hunt for a solution that will allow me to import the materials defined using the NVIDIA MDL into BlenderPy or Blender itself.
Do you happen to have any guidance or recommendations for how to accomplish this?
The materials in the vMaterials library are not just Bitmaps you can directly use with blender materials, there are procedural modifications, runtime colorization and compositions in the MDL code. You could use the “baking” example we have in the MDL SDK to bake fixed maps based on current parameter settings and use those, but you will loose the procedural flexibility of MDL and procedural features like carpaint flakes or procedural will lose their quality.
Full support in Blender will need the integration of MDL into its rendering pipeline