Blender object exporting trouble

[Thaumaturge]

I did try the earlier version of Blender and the issue with YABEE was unabated.

That’s very odd. o_0

At this point, I recommend posting your problems with YABEE in the main YABEE thread–the guy who created YABEE (by the name of “ninth”) is probably your best bet for figuring out what’s going wrong.

I export the data, copy the png file into the same directory, and Panda places a copy on each face, mostly. The ones that get it are single copies, tall and narrow and one face is upside-down, the bottom is black (of no actual consequence but maybe helpful to know).

With regards to the textures being upside-down, my best guess is that one step or another–likely either the obj exporter or obj2egg–is assuming a top-left coordinate system–in which vertical values increase downwards, as in GIMP–where one would expect a bottom-left coordinate system–in which vertical values increase upwards, as in Panda–or vice versa.

But, I also went through the unwrapping procedure in Blender to try and make things work with Panda but it gave me that “inside-out” effect. Yeah, back face culling and facing in instead of out.

Simply tell Blender to reverse (or recalculate) the normals and that should be fixed.

But materials are another thing. I can make a work-around for texture, I have had to do far worse to make things work before. It’s just inelegant. But materials are in the file, are assigned to the polygons, and they do nothing.

But you said above that you are getting your material colours, didn’t you? Are you not seeing the effects of your settings for diffuse lighting, specular highlights, and so on?

(If you’re referring to textures applied in Blender materials, then I think that such might be a more complex situation, and may require you to either use UV-mapping rather than automatic texture coordinates or do some more work of your own; I’m honestly not sure.)

I thought that a material could be assigned to a solid figure in Panda but I guess I am wrong.

Do you mean a material or a texture? They’re not the same thing in Panda, I believe.

… Transparency would not work.
…
I put it in POV-Ray and black is transparent as advertised, made a cut-out from it with no problems.

Do I understand correctly that you’re attempting to use a colour-key for transparency, rather than the alpha channel? If so, then–aside from additive blending, which is unlikely to be appropriate to your case–I’m honestly not sure of how best to go about that in Panda; perhaps you could achieve this using two texture stages…

More simply, have you tried making the black section transparent in GIMP? (That is, instead of solid black, giving it an alpha channel (if it doesn’t have one) and then erasing the parts that are intended to be transparent.) Alpha-transparency should work well in Panda. (It may still call for explicitly setting the transparency attribute; I’m not sure offhand.)

Otherwise, again, how are you displaying this in Panda? Are you creating a quad in Blender and applying it to that? Using OnscreenImage? Something else?

In Blender the walls have warts and crinkles just fine. In Panda everything is uniform cartoonium without character. I mean, I don’t expect photorealism or anything but it should look like something more than play-doh.

If you’re referring to things like normal mapping, then that calls for shaders, I believe–as well as exporting the normal map, and possibly additional vertex information; I don’t know how that’s achieved using (or even if it’s supported by) the exporters that you’re using, but I believe that it is supported by YABEE (albeit that it calls for explicit instruction to do so). On the Panda side, relatively simple effects like normal mapping are supported via the default shader generator.

I also greatly appreciate the advice that you are sharing.

It’s my pleasure.

Honestly, I think that the first thing to do is to get YABEE working for you; I don’t know, offhand, to what degree the exporters that you’re using support what you’re trying to do (or even how much of it the obj format that you’re passing through supports), and I’d like to remove them as a potential source of your problems.

The things that you’re talking about–normal mapping, proper texure mapping, etc. all work in Panda as far as I’ve seen. I export successfully from Blender (albeit using YABEE and with UV-mapped objects).