I have blender 2.46, chicken R91. I did the blender tutorial to make a gingerbread man, and tried to export it using chicken. On the chicken panel , I see “Status: No apparent problems”, my output filename, buttons for: View Report Page, Update Selection, Select, Force Relative Tex, Make Octree, Collision Octree, Tangents & Binormals, Quit, Help, egg2bam, pview, pzip, Export and Save. That’s all, no buttons or fields about animations. And the exported .egg indeed lacks armitures and animations. What’s going wrong?
(BTW, I have two copies of Python 2.5, one installed with blender and one installed with Panda3D; I have yet to update the blender copy to point to Panda3D, I presume exporting from blender is not dependent on Panda3D.)
for the chicken manual . simply click the “help” button.
please not the gingerbread man tutorial is old… VERY old. and uses an old and deprecated way to do animation. chicken only supports animation with armature+armaturemodifier (not the old reparenting armature+mesh).
I may have an even more basic problem. Let me illustrate with a second example. I start Blender afresh. I just have the default scene: the cube, lamp, and camera. Looking at that old help doc, it shows “Status: Character Mode Export” in the first screen shot. Since there is no armiture in the default scene I expect to see “Status: Static Scene Export Mode” instead when I try this. But I do not see that. Instead I see “Status: no apparent problems”. Is something going wrong here?
When exporting with chicken, sometimes is says bad tangents and binormals. When this happens, an object loaded into Panda will not display lighting correctly. Only one side of the object will remain lit by light no matter how you rotate it.
Can anyone explain in detail WTF is going on when this happens?
Whilst a mirror modifier can certainly create problems that particular warning happens with either degenerate geometry or degenerate uv mapping - i.e. if two or more vertices share the same location or if the uv coordinates for vertices of a face are identical. In both situations tangents/bi-tangents can not be calculated and normal mapping will go screwy, resulting in bad lighting.
so nothing is wrong. the docs arent always up2date. that’s nothing to worry about.