Avatar with blend shapes into Panda3d

General Discussion
1

Hi,

I have avatars that animate and talk, including blendshapes, that I want to import into Panda3d. They are in FBX format so I can import them into Max or Maya. I have successfully exported from Max to egg, and then loaded into Panda3d, but the blendshapes are missing. I then read a post that said only Maya exports blendshapes to egg, so I then tried using Maya 2009. However, there are no instructions for Maya in the Installing-Plugins.txt file, so I just used the MayaPandaTool script, which appeared to go through the motions of exporting the avatar, but with no resulting egg file. I then tried just exporting a cube, and this produced no file either. I’m obviously doing something fundamentally wrong, but what? And am I correct in thinking only Maya exports blendshapes?

2

cant tell you what exactly you’r doing wrong here since i’m not a maya guy. but i think chicken at least had blend-shapes as experimental feature once. so this would add blender to maya. maya’s blendshape propably is alot more mature.

3

open Maya script editor, and you’ll see the full error messages during export.

4

Thanks for the replies; I tried looking at the Maya script editor after exporting the cube, and there were no error messages - as far as it was concerned the file exported correctly, but no egg file appears in the designated folder.

Anyone else have any definite info on blendshapes? I was really hoping that Panda would be the one that actually worked in this respect, I’ve not found anything else yet that does.

5

I bet it just dropped the egg file into some folder where you’re not expecting to find it.

But the most reliable way to convert from Maya is to use the maya2egg command-line tool. Try using that. There is a description of this tool in the Panda3D manual.

david

6

Just for completeness: Chicken (The exporter for Blender.) does support blend shapes, but only exports them such that you can control them in code - it ignores them when exporting animations, so is a bit useless really, except for a few special cases.

There is a Collada to egg pipeline however - not sure if that has any blend shape support, but it might. Its probably best to stick to figuring out Maya however.