Hey guys,
My coworker and I are diving into scenekit and arkit. He's coding and I'm doing the 3D work. We're starting with a Christmas tree object that needs ornaments with different gloss, spec and reflective properties using Blinn materials. We've noticed that not all dae exports are created equal. I've exported dae files from Maya, Max, Blender and Photoshop. I've even converted from fbx to dae using the Autodesk fbx converter. For whatever reason I can't get dae files to export out of Maya or Max without it taking hours to export. The fbx converter didn't work at all. I'm thinking that it may be too outdated. Photoshop exports a working dae very fast but doesn't embed the color materials. Instead you have to export textures and apply them in xcode. This is fine but I'd rather not have extra files that I don't need since everything is solid colors. Blender worked the best. It exported a dae with the materials embeded with their color.
The problem we're now facing is that even though we can import the dae with maps or embedded materials, they all recieve the same default gloss, spec and reflectivity even though they are not exported that way in Blender. Making changes in the material editor doesn't change anything. We've cranked the reflectivity and spec sliders all the way up and it changes the look of the object in the scene view but when we run it in arkit on the phone everything has the same material look just different colors. We've also tried importing a dae we found on turbosquid and it works with no issues. Each object has it's own defined properties. At this point we've gone down every path we can think of. If you guys have any ideas we are all ears.
Update: We're also noticing that even when we use lambert materials the objects are still glossy. We've tried switching the lighting model in xcode to lambert as well and that didn't have any effect.
