Update Importing 3D scenes documentation for Godot 4.0

[Calinou]

• Mention .blend import.
• Mention .fbx import.
• Document OBJ import modes and limitations.
• Mention Blender's built-in Collada usually working OK for simple scenes without animation (from personal experience).
• Remove mentions of ESCN export as the exporter is currently not compatible with Godot 4.0. Since contributor interest in this exporter is low, it's unlikely to be fixed for Godot 4.0's release.

This PR doesn't mention the Advanced Import Settings dialog. This is something that can be done in a separate PR, as it's independent from documenting which formats are supported.

I haven't removed the dedicated pages about the ESCN exporter – let me know if I should do that.

See #5121.

[clayjohn]

Looks good to me Would be nice to have someone from the import team provide input on content

[skyace65]

Everything here looks good, information on using the advanced importer for 3D scenes can be added in a future PR.

Before I give approval, was support for .ESCN dropped in Godot 4? If it was the pages for how to use that importer should be removed as well.

[fire]

As far as I know the ESCN importer is text scn renamed. The autolod feature not working, but that's an ordinary bug.

I think ESCN should be kept even if the Blender plugin is delayed, because there's usecases for taking an ordinary text scn renaming it to go through the import process again.

EDITED to clarify it has to be text scene

Example usecase

1. I want to import a escn to compress a PackedScene's animation as a pure animation library with compressed animations
2. I manually created a PackedScene mesh geometry and want to run autolod

References

• Renaming a TSCN to ESCN doesn't regenerate lods godot#63862

[YuriSizov]

there's usecases for taking an ordinary scn renaming it to go through the import process again.

That doesn't seem like a valid use-case for supporting a custom file extension. Currently format does not work in Godot 4 anyway, so even as a hack it's not usable.

[fire]

When I last tested taking a tscn and renaming to escn works, so I'll get a pr for the importer mesh instance 3d conversion in a few hours.

[fire]

I pushed a pr godotengine/godot#71409 to modify the importer code that expects importer mesh instance 3d. It will preserve the ability for a Blender escn exporter to be upgraded and the tscn to escn usecase.

[skyace65]

@Calinou the ESCN PR got merged so this can be updated. put the escn info that was deleted back in and it should be good to go.

[Calinou]

@Calinou the ESCN PR got merged so this can be updated. put the escn info that was deleted back in and it should be good to go.

The add-on is still not updated to work with Blender 3.4, so I'm not sure if it's a good idea to list it.

I remember discussing with reduz that ESCN export should no longer be recommended to new users in general. There are likely different ways to allow exporting Blender materials directly to Godot.

[YuriSizov]

I agree, we shouldn't promote it in the current state and with no internal intention to support it. If it's patched to work in some edge cases, that's fine. But we should not recommend it, and definitely should not call it the most powerful option. I think we should remove the mention for now. If there is some effort to support it, we can always re-add it.

[lyuma]

We might also want to add a comment to use the latest version of the tooling because the gltf addons are still actively developed and in the case of Blender, there are major bugfixes in gltf export as recently as blender 3.4

escn import should be put back in but it should be clear that this is "escn for godot 4", and not intended for escn exporters for blender and elsewhere.
See fire's comment for valid usecases of escn.

• sharing scenes made for the same godot version
• running mesh or animation optimizations on godot content

Also, a side note but shouldn't escn for godot 3 import fine in godot 4? This is the upgrade path so godot should translate it. Ah I see this isn't the issue, just that it is unmaintained.

[lyuma]

Suggested change

	will require *all* team members to have Blender installed. While Blender is
	will require *all* team members to have the same version of Blender installed. While Blender is

Blender pushes bugfixes from time to time that can impact the gltf process, so just an idea to point this out. Blender 3.4 files don't open properly in Blender 3.0, for example

[YuriSizov]

sharing scenes made for the same godot version
running mesh or animation optimizations on godot content

We don't have any tooling for this. If you use it in your projects, you're using a hack that happens to work, but this is not a workflow that Godot is designed to have. Thus these are not valid use cases. These also have nothing to do with importing, so even if we were somehow legitimize those hacks, they are irrelevant to this article.

If you have a legitimate use case for packing and sharing Godot scenes between projects, or you want to run some optimization logic on Godot's own resources, then please make a proposal so we can support these cases properly, and not with a "rename TSCN to ESCN and have magic happen" workflow.

[fire]

Let's remove the documentation until we develop one.

I am not wanting to argue over the details over a feature that is minor.

[skyace65]

Given the consensus I'll merge this PR as is.

[maksad1git]

i think a should to copy this from the last issue)))

If u want Godot to support .blend import using Blender 3.x for example 3.4.1, u have to:

• Download official Blender 3.0 from here:
  https://download.blender.org/release/Blender3.0/blender-3.0.0-windows-x64.zip
• Unzip to some folder where it should be
• Run it once and skip welcome dialog
• Close Blender
• Go to Godot and set Blender path to ur Blender 3.0 like it described here:
  https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/assets_pipeline/importing_scenes.html#importing-blend-files-directly-within-godot
• Import some .blend(default cube for example) made in Blender 3.0
• Close Godot
• Reopen Godot and change Blender path to ur Blender 3.4.1 installation
• enjoy

p.s. Level design is much easier with .blend support, so thanks for that guys. Hope u will add last version support))) i think issue is in little count of lines of code)