Behind the scenes, Godot uses Blender to export your '.blend' file into glTF 2.0. It doesn't support keyframe tangents, animating anything beyond transforms and blendshapes. Among many many other issues if you look at glTF in an interchange context. I've written that down in way more detail here: https://gist.github.com/emperorofmars/d8abf0f4b9bd5434f9543511b243a254

In Blender, right now, you can't export animations that target anything other than transforms. (I am aware of the two hacks to allow you to also export blendshape animations). Blender 4.4 will get a new animation system, which fixes that part. But you still can't export your animations properly, it will force bake them.

Way more than animations go into 3d assets, it's just the most broken part right now. An extension system would be rather nice, or a material system that doesn't hard define a small set of properties^^

Once upon a time there was Collada. But now it seems like USD is the open format gaining traction.

Blender already has support, they just need to add USD support to Godot now. And someone's already made a plugin so you can already import them today (in theory, I haven't used it yet)

https://xkcd.com/927/

You can't create 3d models in Godot. (To be pedantic you can, but it's not made for that)

Blender can perfectly produce models intended for real time rendering. It also has the Eevee renderer^^ Whether a 3d file stores 10k or 10M vertices doesn't matter. It's on you, the asset creator, to know the requirements of your project/customer/employer. Blender, or any other tool, should not impose any artificial restriction on that.

The model made in Blender should arrive in Godot without having lost any data that both tools do support perfectly. The thing that holds the model while it goes from one to the other, either looses half the work, or Blender itself refuses to put in big parts of your work, because they weren't able to fully and correctly reverse engineer FBX.

I'm not faulting Blender developers for the reverse engineering, I'm arguing for a format that does the basics right, isn't proprietary, and hopefully extensible.

I feel like the blender and Godot communities should have enough overlap to provide a steady stream of documentation and tutorials.

I would love to see a tutorial showing a minimal game built from the ground up including modeling, texturing, and animating models in Blender then transferring them to Godot and building the game. Instead people seem to focus on one app or the other and hand wave away the details of the transfer.

Yes, so much yes on the first part! Want to implement the simplest thing in UnityGLTF? You have to fork it, and force all your users to use your very special fork.

I assume you mean my 'nna' project with the second part? That serializes data into the node-names of the model's hierarchy. It is as stupid as it sounds, but it works reliably, and I don't need to modify any exporter/importer. The data is part of the file itself.

If you wanted to embed data into a format more legitimately, you would have to modify its exporter/importer, and the format would have to support extensions in the first place.