1.3.0

BlenderToRCP 1.3.0

Features

• Adds an opt-in Apply RealityKit (Y-Up) to Geometry option that bakes a −90° X rotation into mesh data and exports a native Y-up USD with no root orientation (instancing-safe, shape-key aware, available from the UI and CLI). Automatically falls back to root orientation conversion, with a warning, on scenes with animated, constrained or armature-deformed transforms.
• Adds a Material Color Only – Lit PBR bake mode so RealityKit lights the baked color instead of showing it full-bright, with a roughness control (per-texel maps or averaged constant). The bake-mode info hint now states the resulting material type per mode (#3).
• Detects transparency from the material's real Alpha input instead of the deprecated blend_method, so opaque materials no longer export transparent; opacityThreshold is only authored for cutout transparency.
• Authors flat-color materials as exact USD constants instead of baking them into single-color textures.
• Bakes at each material's source-texture resolution by default (with a 512px floor; Lighting & Shadows keeps the fixed 2048 default), clamps deterministic bake passes to 1 sample, and reuses one baked material+texture set across instanced objects for instanceable references.

Fixes

• Fixes Bake & Export wiping the staging directory after baking, which left the exported USD pointing at a deleted texture while a hash-suffixed rescue copy shipped instead (#2).
• Fixes the bake-reuse cache identity (keyed on stable datablock ids and full material names) so different meshes can never share the wrong baked texture.
• Fixes the Y-up geometry bake for parented hierarchies with rotated, non-uniformly scaled parents (transforms are now rewritten in closed form, avoiding shear loss) and for collection-instance empties, whose content previously exported Z-up inside the Y-up stage.
• Fixes packed images with unsaved edits being overwritten with stale on-disk content during export.
• Fixes bake progress stalling below 100% on scenes with instanced duplicates or flat-only materials.
• Staging directories are always cleaned up via a safety-gated finally, and baked-material names no longer compound across re-bakes.

1.2.0

BlenderToRCP 1.2.0

• Adds opt-in USD export texture overrides for resizing and AVIF/PNG transcoding while preserving original texture format/dimensions when requested.
• Routes AVIF conversion through external avifenc with PNG fallback paths to avoid Blender-native AVIF save crashes.
• Stages all USD exports through isolated per-output temp directories and publishes fresh sidecar assets.
• Moves texture and baking controls under USD Export Settings and simplifies the main Actions panel.
• Makes diagnostics an explicit export setting/CLI flag instead of always-on preference behavior.
• Fixes RealityKit normal-map decode selection so non-default normal strength or object-space maps keep stdlib normalmap semantics.

BlenderToRCP 1.1.0

BlenderToRCP 1.1.0

• Adds Blender 5.1 bake/export hardening, structured diagnostics, and support bundles.
• Improves background bake/export status reporting, failure feedback, and artifact links.
• Simplifies the export UI around Export Scene and Bake Textures & Export, with Lighting & Shadows as the default bake result.
• Adds asset preflight checks for bake/export and skips strict source graph validation when baking.
• Includes bakeTest.blend sample attribution and the installable BlenderToRCP.zip extension archive.

1.0.0

Full Changelog: 1.0.0-alpha5...1.0.0

Changelog

• Fixed CLI addon auto-loading for Blender development installs that use extensions/user_default/BlenderToRCP.
• Fixed addon preference lookup so blendertorcp preferences get works with symlinked extension module names.
• Fixed settings list to load the addon before inspecting export settings.
• Added unit coverage for extension-module auto-discovery and addon enable behavior.
• Updated README, CLI docs, and the blendertorcp-setup skill to document the real extension layout, dev symlink flow, and stronger setup verification steps.

1.0.0-alpha5

What's Changed

• Add CLI, API layer, skills, docs, and test suite by @tomkrikorian in #1

Full Changelog: 1.0.0-alpha4...1.0.0-alpha5

1.0.0-alpha4

This prerelease adds AVIF bake/export support, improves baked alpha handling, and fixes AVIF texture staging for portable USD outputs.

Highlights

• Added a Bake Settings image format selector with AVIF as the default and PNG as the fallback.
• Baked opacity is now merged into the base texture alpha channel so exported unlit materials use a shared RGBA texture path.
• Fixed USD staging so .avif textures stay in textures/ instead of being duplicated into assets/.
• AVIF image saving is only available in Blender 5.1 or newer. Older Blender builds now warn and automatically fall back to PNG.

1.0.0-alpha3

Full Changelog: 1.0.0-alpha2...1.0.0-alpha3

Changelog

• Improved USDZ export cleanup by staging package contents in a temporary per-export directory and removing that staging data after packaging.
• Fixed Bake & Export for USDZ so baked textures are staged inside the USDZ packaging flow instead of being left next to the final .usdz.
• Expanded the documentation to better cover Blender UI locations, export and bake workflows, diagnostics, contributor tooling, and overall architecture.

1.0.0-alpha2

BlenderToRCP 1.0.0-alpha2

Release date: 2026-02-20
Commit: 518714f — New bake unlit process

Highlights

• New Bake & Export Unlit workflow.
• Better background-job monitoring with step-aware progress and timeout handling.

Added

• Bake Mode options:
  • Unlit (Albedo)
  • Lit (IBL baked)
• New Lit/IBL controls:
  • IBL source (Scene World or HDRI File)
  • HDRI filepath
  • IBL strength
  • IBL rotation
• New Isolate Meshes (Lit) option:
  • Hides non-target meshes during lit bake to reduce cross-mesh shadow contribution.
• New Step Timeout (sec) option:
  • Cancels the background job if a single step runs too long.
• New modal background job watcher:
  • Tracks running jobs, refreshes state, detects unexpected exits, and enforces timeout.
• Status payload enhancements:
  • step_elapsed_seconds now included in job status updates.

Changed

• Bake & Export now follows an Unlit-first bake process (base color + optional opacity path).
• Bake progress now reports detailed step labels (e.g. Step X/Y) and per-step timing.
• Background status writes are now atomic (.tmp + replace) for safer UI reads.
• Architecture and README documentation updated to reflect the new Unlit bake flow and IBL isolation behavior.

Fixed

• Better resilience when reading background job status (Waiting for status file... / Reading status... fallbacks).
• More robust background process termination path when timing out (graceful terminate + force kill fallback).
• Bake operator compatibility fallback for Blender API differences when optional bake kwargs are unsupported.

Files changed

• Plugin/bake_export_runner.py
• Plugin/export/bake_textures.py
• Plugin/export/materials/extract/core.py
• Plugin/ops/bake_export_operator.py
• Plugin/ui/panel.py
• README.md
• docs/ARCHITECTURE.MD

1.0.0-alpha

[1.0.0] - 2026-02-02

Initial release.

Added

• USD export pipeline for Reality Composer Pro:
  • Export .usda, .usdc, and .usdz from Blender.
  • Post-process USD via OpenUSD Python (pxr) for RCP compatibility.
• Material conversion:
  • Strict validation mode (no silent fallbacks; unsupported nodes block export with actionable errors).
  • Rewrite supported Blender shader graphs into RealityKit ShaderGraph / MaterialX graphs.
• Portable outputs:
  • Stage textures/assets next to the USD and normalize asset paths to be relative.
• Animation support:
  • Export-friendly action concatenation and restoration of the .blend state.
  • Author an AnimationLibrary component with clip definitions derived from action segments.
• Bake & Export (background):
  • Bake textures and export an Unlit workflow in a background Blender process (UI stays responsive).