The Blender community has such great content under Creative Commons, on sites such as BlendSwap. But Blender is so often a nightmare to export content from, for people who care nothing about their precious Cycles renderer and who loathe wrestling with Blender’s horrible User Interface. I must have tried at least a hundred such exports from Creative Commons .BLEND files in my time. But roughly 50% of the time you just have to give up, as there’s no way on earth that the mesh and its loading textures are coming out in a viable and easy manner.
So the rest of us are still in need of that mythical simple “blender to .OBJ with textures” exporter. It would export…
* the mesh as .OBJ… automatically excluding lights, domes, grounds and similar scene clutter.
* a proper .MTL file, with clear editable texture references in it (e.g.: map_Ka mapfile.png), rather than a jammed-together block of Cycles gibberish which only Blender understands.
* all the embedded texture .JPG files if they exist, neatly and automatically output in the same folder to work with an aligned .MTL file, so that they actually load up in any another 3D software.
So just a really pure and simple exporter, an exporter which works even when the .BLEND file author has fiddled with all sorts of settings and switches which mess up such a simple export to .OBJ or .FBX.
Perhaps this could be enabled by having BlendSwap enforce or retrospectively apply a simple word-tagging of the core mesh, and also any bitmap textures, inside Blender. The export script would then look for these tags inside the .BLEND and hook onto them?