Horde3D

Asset validation is an important part of the asset pipeline. Some information for artists regarding common problems (also degenerated triangles or normals) makes it a lot easier to track problems early that might only show up later.

Well, there should be support for models without texture coordinates anyway. But of course it needs an appropriate shader for rendering those models.

Yep, I think emitting a warning would be the good thing to say, I am just pointing out that when we don't want tex coords, we get annoying warnings anyway...

I just added the warning to the community branch and also added the "animation only" button from flammable.

Volker >> the version in SVN didn't have mix bugfix for NaN values...I added it.

Last version is here : [url=http://mm-werkstatt.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/public/Horde3D/trunk/Tools/Exporters/Blender/Horde3DExport.py]Horde3DExport.py[url]

Ah, I accidentally had overwritten the changes again when starting to port the CB to Beta4. That's probably also the reason why flammable had an old version. Thanks for fixing it again

I just added an ugly patch to the Blender exporter because I got NaN values for some normals in my model...
Now the exporter emits a warning and exports [0, 0, 0], which is not quite good :/

I know, this sort of things is annoying. Every engine has a certain set of rules and conventions for assets that artists need to follow. So not all models are always valid. Some mistakes can be fixed automatically by the asset pipeline (like removal of zero sized triangles) but to avoid further complications, it is usually better if artists create clean models and fix invalid models.

So the best we can do is making it easy for artists to recognize which parts of a model are broken. This requires good communication of the asset problems in form of warnings. However, it is still difficult to see which specific polygons are affected. A convenient way to overcome this for a direct converter could be to add an option that will select/mark all invalid triangles after export. This makes it easier to quickly fix the problems.

Hmm you are right, in my case for example, it would be interesting if the exporter selected the vertices which have problems...
It must not be so hard to add to the exporter, I will have a look at this

I just modified the Blender exporter for adding some buttons to have more precise control of which files are created (if we want to create a static mesh, we can skip the creation of the .anim file for example).
I also made some changes to the "warnings" system, it should be better now

Next step would be to find out why the animations are so buggy...

Great work! Thanks a lot!

4 days ago, Blender 2.5 alpha0 went out, and final 2.6 is expected for mid-2010.
As it is a huge rewrite of a lot of Blender internals, it comes also with incompatibilities, and among them, the animation system is totally new and the Python API is based on a module named "bpy", instead of the "Blender" module for Blender 2.4x.

The exporter is incompatible with this release, for the moment at least. Also, I haven't found the "COLLADA" export option in Blender 2.5 alpha0, but it seemed to be far from perfect anyway when I tested it from the associated GSoC branch on Blender SVN repository.

Permanently - the exporter API has been completely rewritten.
You need a 2.5 alpha specially built with collada support. It isn;t terribly stable yet, but expect things to improve as we move into next year

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

You mean the Python API; I know it is totally incompatible, by "for the moment", I mean because the exporter has not been updated yet to the new API ^^. And I wonder if this will be necessary or not, depending on the COLLADA support...


Yes, COLLADA support is not built in the alpha0 release. When I compiled myself the GSoC branch, the COLLADA exportation was very basic and did not support animations...

whats the svn repo for GSoC branch? can't seem to find it.

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Let's bring 'em out! Any old iron! Any old iron!
A door opens and a homewife brings out a rather sophisticated-looking ground-to-air missile system, and dumps it on the cart.
Thank you.

with the new exporter for blender 2.63+ i hope to have fixed most problems.
for animation it is necessary to have the armatures origin at the objects origin. sorry no script solution found yet.
nla tracks have to be added as well.

for more information see user_docu.pdf in community svn or:
http://www.hcm-lab.de/projects/GameEngi ... rdesigners