Would you mind sharing your plans and scraps?
Seeing the growing interest, collective development might be worth a try.
Nemesis#13: It was just a few bits of paper with notes on - not even sure where they are as I have so many piles of paper lying around! Nothing that can’t be recreated with relative ease though.
onelson: To understand instancing I would read the Chicken manual as it gives how that works from a users perspective, which is the complex bit - basically it has multiple ways to setup the scene to support them, mostly to do with supporting level editing capabilities (Naith uses this feature extensively.). But it does create Panda instances in the .egg file, though this is not hard to do - its the many ways of deciding what to specify as the file being instanced that is the issue. One thing to note - it currently only supports instancing of other files, not instancing geometry that is shared within a single file (Though you can have geometry in a file that is tagged such that Chicken makes it into an instance of another file.). Panda does support that, as does Blender, but chicken never has. Also note that it supports using Blender instancing but not panda instancing, forcing a convert to an empty - this is very useful for level editing where you might want stand-in meshes where empties are.
If anyone is still working on a 2.5x pipeline method, you would totally make my day if you could make it support exporting Blender’s shape keys.
It would make animating faces SO much easier. Plus, besides facial expressions, some character models in my game are very difficult to animate with bones alone.
Will the coming DAE support in Panda import shape keys? This would really rock! Though does the DAE format even support them? Does Blender export them correctly in 2.5?