This page presents early-stage work for directly exporting the X3D V4 PhysicalMaterial node from Blender. There is an existing two-step export and conversion based on current implementations of Blender (and the Blender glTF import/export extension ) and Castle Game Engine to performing this conversion.

The example material shown here is intended to represent brass metal (by choice of base color , metallic, and roughness values ), and a normal map defined by a texture to give the visual appearance of indentations ("dimples") in the metal. For simplicity texture-based blending of the base color , metallic, roughness are not tested with this example.

Initial results:

• The two-step process, along with some manual editing, yields an X3D file that passes current X3D V4 validation
• The resulting file, along with X3DOM variant described below, give equivalent visualizations in three X3D viewers
• Reminded that X3DOM uses different names for some of the fields of the PhysicalMaterial node.

modified Dec 16 2025

• X_ITE
• Castle Model Viewer
• X3DOM

• InstantPlayer 2.8.0 renders just a white rectangle, not surprisingly since 2.8.0, the latest public release, was released in July 2016.
• Freewrl 6.7.0 does not render anything, and an error message is written to console.

1. Create material in Blender 4.2 with assistance from Blender Material documentation and wealth of tutorial information on the web. For purposes of this project the material was applied to a simple planar rectangle mesh.
2. Export from Blender as glb file using the standard glTF Blender extension.
3. Import glb into Castle Model Viewer and save as X3D file named dimpled_brass.x3d
4. Edit dimpled_brass.x3d file with X3D-Edit plug-in to NetBeans.
   • Removed the proposed X3D v4.1 Tangent node that Castle Game Engine conversion includes in X3D export.
   • For readability replaced the PixelTexture node with an ImageTexture node.
   • With assistance of X3D-Edit QA tools edited some non-conforming DEF values and added recommended meta tags.
5. Created a non-conforming variant file named dimpled_brass_x3dom.x3d which uses different field names in the PhysicalMaterial node. Refer to the differing specifications:
   X3D V4 PhysicalMaterial specification.
   • X3DOM PhysicalMaterial documentation.

• dimpled_brass.blend [1.1 MB] created in Blender 4.2
• dimpled_brass.glb [130 kB] exported from Blender 4.2
• normal_map_dimples.png [128 kB] image used as normal map texture.
• x3dfiles.zip [131 kB] archive containing X3D files and shared image file used for normal map texture.