Godot Blender Vertex Baker

This project provides a way to bake material-less colored meshes from Blender into Godot. This can significantly reduce draw calls for purely color-based geometry.

Features:

• A Blender add-on to export meshes with baked vertex attributes (color, emission, metallic, roughness) into .glb.
• A Godot importer to load the model and assign shader materials.

Limitations:

• The exporter reuses the vertex color channel for emission, so it’s not a 1:1 match with Blender’s Principled BSDF emission settings.

Blender exporter

• Adds an export option: File -> Export -> gLTF (Baked Vertex Color).
• Bakes material properties into mesh attributes:
  • Albedo + Emission - stored in AlbedoEmission vertex color attribute.
  • Metallic + Roughness - stored in UV2.
  • Emission Strength - stored in UV1.
• Splits objects by material, processes each surface, and rejoins them for export.
• Ignores textured materials.
• Exports .glb files for Godot.

Godot importer

• Runs automatically on assigned models during import.
• Handles metadata exported from Blender:
  • no_import - skips importing the object.
  • no_shadow - disables shadow casting.
  • instanced_material - forces unique material instead of reusing shared ones.
• Converts imported StandardMaterials into ShaderMaterials:
  • Uses vertex_standard.gdshader or textured_standard.gdshader.
  • Detects if textures are present (albedo, emission, normal).
• Reuses materials where possible to save memory.

Shaders

• textured_standard.gdshader Uses textures + vertex color tinting.
• vertex_standard.gdshader Uses only vertex colors and baked data for lightweight rendering.

Both support:

• Dithered alpha clipping (via Bayer matrix).
• Emission, metallic, and roughness baked directly into mesh data.

Usage

1. Copy blender_addons/gltf_baked_export.py to your Blender add-ons folder.
2. In Blender, open Edit -> Preferences -> Add-ons -> Install and select the script.
3. Enable gLTF (Baked Vertex Color) Exporter.
4. Assign Principled BSDF materials in Blender (base color, emission, metallic, roughness, alpha).
5. Export models via File -> Export -> gLTF (Baked Vertex Color).
6. OPTIONAL: You may want to save the model before export and then revert it. The exporter internally creates temporary copies of your objects to bake data. These copies are deleted after export, so the original scene remains unchanged. However, reverting after ensures no extra data sticks around.
7. Copy shaders and the model_importer.gd from godot_src/ into your Godot project.
8. Assign the model_importer.gd to the Import Script path of the exported .glb files and click Reimport.

Feedback & Bug Reports

If there are additional variations you would find useful, or if you find any bugs or have other feedback, please open an issue.