Horde3D

Hi All,

I'm new to the horde but am enjoying all the great work that you guys have done!

I have been going quite well importing assets from blender 2.58 (via collada) until recently I have hit a snag relating to skeletal animations. This is just an inquiry to see if anyone out there has any experience importing armature based animations into Horde3d from blender (2.5+)

Just a few extra details:
* Mesh animation appears to be exporting/importing/rendering OK.
* There are no errors or warnings from ColladaConv (for both types anim/model)
* I am testing with a very simple rig (2 bones in a cube!)
* A nearly identical rig exported from Maya and works perfectly!
* The blender exporter is not functional in 2.58 (it appears to use a deprecated blender API)
* I'm new to Blender as well as Horde3D so am hopefully missing something obvious

Any ideas/thoughts greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Andrew.

The blender exporter was written for the pre 2.5 blender versions, since we expected blender 2.5 to have a proper collada exporter.
Maybe that's not the case, or maybe we still got issues with supporting the collada specification correctly in ColladaConv.

Can you provide your test blender scene file to allow reproduction of the conversion process?

Certainly. You can download my test blender file from the link below.

http://impromptu.moso.com.au/extras/abox_anim.blend

Update: after delving a little deeper it appears (probably no surprise to this forum) that the problem appears to be with blenders collada exporter. It appears to send the correct number of animation frames - but with the same data in each frame! This then gets compressed to a single frame - quite correctly - by Horde3D.

I'm just downloading the blender src and will get back to the list when I either (a) get stuck or (b) find a solution

Cheers,
Andrew.

Thanks for the feedback. Maybe this page is of interest for you. Perhaps if you contact Nathan Letwory he can help you fixing this problem.

OK, so the blender team are currently reworking the Collada exporter. As a short term solution I have a slightly clunky, although functional solution for blender users wanting to import animated models into Horde3D. Depending on the quality of the Collada export rewrite this may end up being a medium term solution also

Blenders FBX export appears to be working reasonably well. So first export as FBX and then use AutoDesks fbxconverter to convert to collada. I have only tried this with relatively simple models but it is working well ... at least significantly better than directly exporting collada from blender.

FbxConverter is available, free of charge, for Windows,OSX and Linux platforms. I can confirm that (somewhat surprisingly) the Linux version works quite well. Link for all platforms below.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc ... d=16126812

Not perfect but will hopefully carry people over until blenders collada export is functional.

Thanks for your feedback. I remember that some people already did it this way for pre 2.5 versions. I wonder why it is such a big problem to have a working collada exporter if the FBX exporter works fine.