ELE Blender Texture Exporter

Welcome to the Eclipse Light Engine Blender Texture Exporter.  This asset is a Blender file that contains materials and a Python script for use with the Eclipse Light Engine.  The purpose of this is to automatically export the needed sprites/textures that Eclipse needs.  Note that it is pretty much only useful for this purpose.  You possibly could use bits and pieces for other uses(like the normal map material shader graph), but without combining Eclipse it isn't very useful.

Eclipse needs a total of 6 things for the PBR shaders.

• Albedo
• Metalness
• Roughness
• Ambient Occlusion
• Normals
• Emission

In order to optimize for the current shader levels that Gamemaker supports, Eclipse expects all of these things to be packed into 3 textures.

• Albedo(with alpha)
• Packed Texture
  • Red - Metal
  • Green - Roughness
  • Blue - Ambient Occlusion
• Normal Map(with Emission packed into the alpha channel)

Eclipse has an associated texture mapper that can be used to pack all of these things correctly.  However, if you are rendering  with Blender, and more so if you are rendering lots of animation frames, you would either need to use the texture packer one frame at a time, or mess with turning animations into strips and then running the texture packer.  This Blender file can handle rendering your models into animation frames with all the materials packed and ready to import into Gamemaker.

The files available are the starter.blend file, which has everything needed to automatically export renders, and documentation in two formats(.chm and .pdf).  The Blender file was created with Blender 3.3.0, the latest stable at the time of this writing.  I don't think I used any features of Blender that are exclusive to this new version so you may be able to open the file with older versions, but I make no guarantees.

Support for the Eclipse Light Engine should be directed to the creator.  Support for this Texture mapper can be found on the Firehammer Games Discord(https://discord.gg/6VrZkP2).  I have created a channel specifically for it.

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I just added a file starter(with alpha fix).blend here.  It fixes a bug where some stray pixels in the normal map had a very small color value (close to black but not exactly 0.0).  I never figured out why Blender was adding this in the emission texture but I fixed it by making anything with an alpha below 0.01 just be 0.  Note that I used Blender 4.1 for this so it may not work with older versions.