Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Blender exporter re-write

I finally started working on a skin animation exporter with the hope of merging it with the existing exporter but ended up re-writing the entire exporter.

I wrote a few stand alone scripts over the weekend just to test the python API and see how I can integrate it with nebula. Initially I didn't know much about nebula's animation files and I had to figure it out the hard way, by looking at existing code, specifically the 3DS Max exporter which was a lot of help. Nebula's documentation also offered some help.

By yesterday, I could export animations but my script still has a problem exporting the initial skeleton's pose. I posted my problem on blender's forum and went on with re-writing the rest of the exporter.

The mesh exporter is pretty much done and I just started working on adding animations yesterday. I've already run into a problem with transform animations though, I cant figure out how to get key frames from a blender object IPO yet but I'm looking into it. In the mean time, I will work on skin animation support, getting key frames for this is pretty straight forward, I wish it was as straight forward for object animations.

8 comments:

Bruce said...

You'll want to consider talking with Kim (author of the Max exporter) about supporting nCharacter3 as well.

nCharacter3 is supported by both Nebula2 and Nebula3 (whereas nCharacter2 is only supported by Nebula).

Unknown said...

Hi
I've ported Nebula3 to Linux and if you have a time or could provide your OpenGL sources we could try to run N3 under Linux with OpenGL support.

Sources of Linux port you can find here.

Larry said...

@bruce
Thanks for the advise, Ill get in touch with Kim about nCharacter3 but from his post in floh's blog he doesn't know much about it either, is there really any point of supporting ncharcter2 anymore?

@haron
I got your new Linux foundation sources, I had a problem compiling the testclient and testserver, something about a missing "uuid/uuid.h". I'm running Ubuntu 7.04, when I tried to compile your previous sources I got an error about my gcc being old.

Ill post my sources somewhere and let you know, we see what we can do about geeting N3 running on Linux

Unknown said...

Hello,

Wouldn't it be better if we would have a central place for Nebula3 where we could share the whole stuff related to Nebula3 development like Linux/MacOSX ports and other things?

Larry said...

@attila

I think thats a good idea, according to Bruce's post here Leaf, Kim, Floh and Bruce are working on this perhaps keeping nebula2's community version pitfalls in mind. They would be in a better position to advice on this.

It would be good to have a repository so that everyone can start contributing to its development e.g. Haron has a Linux port of the foundation and I have an OpenGL implimentation, would be good if we could work on these somewhere central and also allow others to help in their development.

The main issue would be that N3 is still largely WIP and Floh is still trying out new stuff and we need to wait for his releases before we can progress on ours.

On of the big issues with N2 in my opinion is that Radon labs work separately from the community so we basically don't know whats going on. At least with N3 we know whats going on through Floh's blog. Its completely understandable though since some of their tools and libraries are propriety and having to strip out what can't be made public every time you make a few changes to the sources sounds like quite a hustle. It would be good if we had a way of working on the same repository as Radon Labs

Jugin said...

Hi guys!
Can anybody share Linux-stuff for Nebula3?
Thanks.

Larry said...

@Jugin Hey, I'm actually currently working on an OSX port and just got the rendering working here It shouldn't be too different from a linux port as not too much is OSX specific.

Jugin said...

Great!
Can I help with porting?
P.S. Please contact me at skype : evgeny.dsoft