Editor: Allow adding URLs instead of files for textures (and other things)

[SollyBunny]

When trying to make a scene you quickly run into the JSON length limit, and most of the text is base64 encoded strings for textures, would be nice if you could give it a URL

[Mugen87]

This would mean the editor must be able to put textures in some sort of storage which is not possible for us to implement. Such services cost money and it would be hard to control the uploads of the users.

[SollyBunny]

@Mugen87 there shouldn't be any need to host things

What I need:

• Point to an absolute URL to an asset

What I want:

• When publishing, write assets into the zip instead of including them in the JSON as b64
• Hosting default assets on GH

As a stretch:

• Integrate with one of the hundred preexisting user generated asset stores

[Mugen87]

Hosting default assets on GH

What do you mean with "default assets"?

[SollyBunny]

What do you mean with "default assets"?

3D Editors sometimes come with some textures, just so that you aren't making single colored cubes

[mrdoob]

I think what @SollyBunny is asking is to be able to have URLs in the JSON texture format.

Surprisingly, the "spec" shows a "url" field already... but I don't think that works.

Making the editor handle these should be an easy AI coding task.

[Mugen87]

Sorry, I misunderstood the issue. I was under the assumption the OP expects that the editor writes textures into a cloud storage and then saves the URL into the JSON.

@SollyBunny Would you be fine with an additional option in the editor settings "embed textures"? By default, it would be set to true but when disabled, the textures are not embedded into the JSON during the scene export. Instead, the editor puts relative URLs into the JSON and saves the textures into the zip.

The second change would be texture inputs in the UI allow URLs. These are saved 1:1 in the JSON and not exported as image files.

[SollyBunny]

The second change would be texture inputs in the UI allow URLs. These are saved 1:1 in the JSON and not exported as image files.

Yeah, only problem is relative wont work unless you somehow supply a root URL but I am okay with that or it can be a future thing

Would you be fine with an additional option in the editor settings "embed textures"? By default, it would be set to true but when disabled, the textures

If you save a JSON you can't take out the textures, if you save a zip putting it in the JSON is ineffecient space wise (compression does not fare well with base64) and exporting can be a destructive thing (export to png from gimp eg)