Applying MDL materials in Blender?

[avid_learner]

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?

[jjordan]

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

[jjordan]

Any such conversion will result in some loss of some fidelity i am afraid.
In Omniverse Platform for 3D Design Collaboration and Simulation | NVIDIA we will soon expose “distilling to UsdPreviewSurface” which would be compatible also with the blender connector in Omniverse.

we also work on GlTF distilling in omniverse.

[FliesEyes]

Has there been any gains on this front or do we know if there are people from either nvidia or blender working on a solution to allow seamless translations between platforms?

[jjordan]

https://docs.omniverse.nvidia.com/extensions/latest/ext_material/ext_mdl-distill-and-bake.html
is released with OV. This is the universal way of moving content but its lossy as already detailed.
We can not comment on anything on behalf of the Blender foundation. From NVIDIA side we are constantly working on improving material exchange but there is nothing new we can announce at this point.
cheers
Jan

[FliesEyes]

I just found the A23D extention/website. It seems to have Blender plugging. If I use these materials from this library does this allow me to use the same material in Omniverse and Blender?

[jjordan]

those are pbr texture sets that are compatible with pretty much all pbr material systems. so yes, those should translate well to blender through OmniPBR

[FliesEyes]

Cool, I will give that a crack. My preference would be to go from model authoring tool to Omniverse but that pipeline might take some time to mature. In the meantime, I will need to find a workflow that gets the job done with minimum pain.