We’re using collada as our model format for the time being, and it’s been pretty smooth sailing so far. We’re starting to look at implementing more complex materials now, however, and I’m unsure what the right modeling-program-neutral approach is. What I’ve seen of the material definitions so far seems to be very specific to whatever that particular platform’s material definition looks like. Is there a standardized way to specify diffuse/normal/specular/glow or whatever other maps our game’s going to need?
For the time being we’re planning on allowing a Max user to load a .fx file as a DirectX shader, and fill in the fields. This gets exported as a set of ‘setparam’ tags with a ‘surface’ tag inside… which should be easy enough, but I’d be shocked if Blender exported the same things. We’re fine with making a special case for our preferred software, but is there a platform-neutral approach we can safely use as a fallback?