Horde3D

Some time ago, I said, that I hired a student to develope a Blender Exporter.
Well he did a great job so far. Export is working quite well for Meshes. But as you might guess we have problems with animations. Mesh Animations are working but not the skeleton ones. Morph Targets are not yet supported at all.

We are both not very familiar with Blender and thought perhaps someone here in the community can help us to finish the exporter. So attached you can find our first steps.

"hired a student"? o_O
good job, I will take a look ( I will need reference for geo format though )
edit:
found: download/file.php?id=7
---> http://www.horde3d.org/docs/_formats.html
what is the endian-ness of the format

The same as the computer which generated the file... You can use the version number in the header to determine if it's little or big endian. If you read a LE file on BE you should get 5 << 24 instead of 5 as the version number.

so it depends on the computer. of course you can detect using the header(header to int then check endian-ness) but it would be good to fix it as little endian or big endian. machine dependant format sounds a little strange

Yes that would be better. Big endian aka network byte order as default? Performance impact on LE shouldn't be measureable - disks are much to slow for that...

On the other hand, little endian machines are far and away more common (apart from some consoles). Perhaps we should just ensure that the engine reads both?

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Perhaps we should first try to get the exporter working well, before we care about the endianess

That was my point, above

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

A small update: Morph Targets / Shape Keys seem to work now, but joint transformations and skinning are still a problem

Another small update,... for some models the bones and morph targets are now supported. But there are still some problematic constellations of joints where the exporter will fail.

Why don't calling Blender forums help?
Perhaps they can help us to creating Blender exporter efficiently and much more faster

also blender dev channel at freenode is another option. they are really helpful

Just got this thing to run, and have one problem with it:

The rotations of the bones sometimes got into the wrong direction or affect wrong axises (while the correct rotation is used as well, so that the leg of my person here rotates correctly around the knee, but also along the leg (=local y axis)

Anybody can confirm that problem?

EDIT: Sry, was my fault. The animations don't work with objects which have been scaled in Object Mode (I thought I had scaled it in edit mode)

Changing line 410 from

to

fixes a crash for me when exporting only a skeleton.

I think the exporter be into SVN btw.

The exporter is on the community branch, so you can submit your little patch if you want.