Hi, Notch Team.
I wonder if there’s a way to generate vertex colors natively in Notch (by baking from texture or otherwise)? If no, then how to properly import vertex colors from other apps? Which format to use?
I’m particularly interested in importing stuff from Blender.
Thank you.
Hi Andrei,
We support vertex colours on 3D objects … and there are a couple of deformers which can generate random colours etc. But when it comes to loading them… of the formats we support, OBJ does not support vertex colours anyway; LWO supports them and we load them happily; C4D only seems to have added them in R18 (?) and I’m not sure yet what the situation is here, but we don’t load them anyway; and FBX, I just added support for loading them for the next release. From Blender I’d say you’d need to use FBX (and the next beta 
).
A texture sampling deformer to apply them to vertex colours could be easy to implement, but is it useful to have vertex colours in this case when you could have the texture anwyay…? Curious to know what the use case is here?
[blockquote]We support vertex colours on 3D objects … and there are a couple of deformers which can generate random colours etc. But when it comes to loading them… of the formats we support, OBJ does not support vertex colours anyway; LWO supports them and we load them happily; C4D only seems to have added them in R18 (?) and I’m not sure yet what the situation is here, but we don’t load them anyway; and FBX, I just added support for loading them for the next release. From Blender I’d say you’d need to use FBX (and the next beta ? ). [/blockquote]
Thanks for the info. But I’m not sure if Blender’s .fbx exporter supports vertex colors. At least there’s no such option. However it does support .ply export. I don’t think you’re interested in implementing a .ply importer especially for Blender geeks. 
But God knows… Maybe someday you’ll get round to that.
[blockquote]A texture sampling deformer to apply them to vertex colours could be easy to implement, but is it useful to have vertex colours in this case when you could have the texture anwyay…? Curious to know what the use case is here?[/blockquote]
In fact, all I wanna do is populate cubes on a sphere and let them pick up colors from texture in the color channel of the sphere’s material. As I can see, there’s no simple way of doing that:
- Cloners / Effectors don’t seem to have such an option,
- Particle Mesh Renderer has a Use Colors checkbox, which, as the name suggests, should assign particle color to instanced meshes (which has never worked for me). Besides, Particle Mesh Renderer doesn’t support 3D Shapes (only 3D Objects) which is rather odd.
Perhaps I should use a deformer for that sort of thing?
Right… You could use cloners with a Clone To Particles node instead of a particle mesh renderer. That way clones can be coloured by the particle colour.
But I think it’s a good idea to add colour sampling to the clone to mesh and clone to voxels nodes too.
Hi, Matt.
[blockquote]Right… You could use cloners with a Clone To Particles node instead of a particle mesh renderer. That way clones can be coloured by the particle colour.[/blockquote]
Yeah. Thanks. That helped a lot. But it works OK only if the Mesh Emitter is set to Polygon Mode. In Vertices Mode texture color is NEVER picked up by the clones. It’s too bad because
cloning to vertices and coloring the clones according to source mesh texture is one of the staple mograph techniques. Besides, aligning clones to source mesh polygon/vertex normals
seems problematic. Imho such alignment should be available out of the box.
[blockquote]But I think it’s a good idea to add colour sampling to the clone to mesh and clone to voxels nodes too.[/blockquote]
I can’t agree more. Thanks. 
P.S. There is a difference between using a 3d Object and 3d Shape as a source object for cloning via Clone to Particles, and a great deal of confusion about Clone To Particles vs particle Mesh Renderer
proper use cases. IMO it deserves a separate post with examples. Hopefully, I’ll get round to that soon enough.
-Andy
Particle Mesh Renderer existed first, but has been superseded by Clone to Particles which offers more flexibility etc. So that’s all there is to it really - we recommend Clone To Particles is used.
OK. Thanks. But what can be done about clone orientation along vertex/polygon normals of the source mesh? Do you have plans to let clones inherit texture colors of the source mesh in Vertices mode?
Clone To Mesh now supports colour sampling. Also there’s a new mode which generates clones using the UV map.