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Blender 2.80: Import / Export

glTF

The Khronos glTF 2.0 importer and exporter is now bundled with Blender. This file format is designed for efficient loading of 3D scenes, often used for game engines and 3D content on the web.

It includes support for objects, meshes, cameras, PBR materials and animation. For more details, see the glTF add-on documentation in the manual.

COLLADA

  • Reorganized user interface.
  • Material I/O is now based on the Principled BSDF.
  • More complete animation import and export, with options to export keyframes or baked animation.
  • Exact preservation of material, bone and object names, encoded with XML entities.
  • Object and Bone Hierarchies are now exported correctly based on parenting in Blender.

Alembic

  • Metaball animation can now be exported.
  • Curve and NURBS object animation can be exported as a mesh with the "Curves as Mesh" option.
  • Imported Alembic files can now be offset by a number of frames. The offset is subtracted from the current frame number to obtain the frame retrieved from the Alembic file.

Images and Video

Metadata

  • Video file output now includes metadata like images, and reading of metadata is supported as well.
  • Added a new metadata field 'Frame Range', which writes the scene's frame range "start:end", for example "32:88". This allows mapping back from a video's frame to the Blender frame that produced it.
  • The hostname of the machine running Blender can now be embedded in the output file metadata. This helps identifying which machine rendered which frame in a multi-machine setup (i.e. render farm).

WebM

WebM support has been added, via FFmpeg's VP9 encoder.

WebM/VP9 and h.264 both have options to control the file size versus compression time (e.g. fast but big, or slow and small, for the same output quality). Since WebM/VP9 only has three choices, we've chosen to map those to 3 of the 9 possible choices of h.264. The choices now are:

  • Good: the default and recommended for most applications.
  • Slower: recommended if you have lots of time and want the best compression efficiency.
  • Realtime: recommended for fast encoding.