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[SOLVED] Writing Blender's exporter - requirements


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I am thinking to find a Python coder who can help with creating a robust exporter into Unigine's mesh/animation format from Blender. What would I need to deliver to the coder so he could successfully develop such exporter?

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The specs should do it provided the coder is reasonably savy with file formats and 3d maths (i am currently stuck converting between unigine bones and blender bones). You are also more than welcome to use my code as a starting point.

Also if your timeframe is going to be more than a few months it might be worth waiting till unigine improves the Collada importer...

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Thanks Danni. The guy is savvy as he invented IQM model format and wrote native Blender exporter for it from scratch. He is asking for the format specs for the Unigine. Where can I get those?

 

Having COLLADA is good, but there is nothing better than direct export from Blender.

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Having COLLADA is good, but there is nothing better than direct export from Blender.

 

Collada supports embedding of custom metadata and instancing. If unigine supports both of these and will import collada files directly then I can't see any reason to prefer a direct export. You can however probably have direct export quite a bit before collada is ready to go. The two tricky things so far have been splitting up the mesh to that per face options become per vertex options (normal, uv_channels) and translating bone hierachies.

 

The specs for the mesh file are in the documentation either the CHM in the /doc subfolder or online.

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  • 3 months later...
IMHO, Unigine Mesh/SMesh file formats are really straightforward and easily can be used in any kind of import/export plugin. I.e. I wrote simple C# SMesh cleaner utility for root bone transformation in 2 hours. Hope these description would come in handy: https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/1.0/code/file_formats

 

My support line is cut off, so I can't access the docs. Is there any way you can post format specs here as I found a person who can try writing exporter for Blender ? Thanks.

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Does Blender support fbx? Unigine have stated they are adding fbx support this year (although they do not say when), this could be a good industry standard solution when added.

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Blender has support for it, but I don't trust it. For example, I needed to get FBX converted to IQM. There is a 3D converter Noesis that can do that job. So, I got FBX file exported by Blender. While Noesis loaded it, the file had messed up hierarchy for bones. So whe I got IQM file, Darkplaces was unable to load it. So I would rather export directly to Unigine's native format.

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As far as I am aware there are licensing provisions with Autodesks stuff that specifically discriminate against gpl licensed software which makes it really difficult for the blender devs to do anything much with the FBX format.

Things are pretty bad with Collada in Blender with the developers just about ready to hand in the towel - however making sure that blender collada plugins work with one specific engine is going to be easier than making it work with everything.

One option that might be interesting though is to use this library http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/downloads/detail?name=AnimKitSrc_r1007.zip do work directly with blender .blend files.

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obviously not out of the box.... (It doesn't know anything about the unigine formats). It would load the file into memory and give you a representation of the data that could be written into the unigine formats this could then be done at the unigine end. The main benefit of doing things this way is that you could have unigine generate the unigine files automatically from the blend files automatically if those files change.

 

I shall have a bit of a play with it and see what is possible

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My support line is cut off, so I can't access the docs.

You can always check docs in chm format stored in <UnigineSDK>/docs folder. Simply go to Programming->Mesh File Formats.

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