Blender's Chicken to egg

General Discussion
1

Hi!

I searched the forums to see how to use the Chicken converter to export Blender models to .egg files, but did not turn up anything I could use.

I have just downloaded blender and the chicken exporter. If I run the chicken_exportR56.py file, it throws me an error saying it can’t import blender.

I found this: http://panda3d.org/manual/index.php/Converting_from_Blender which did not help me at all. The section on how to export stuff from Maya is very clear. If someone could help me, I make sure to update the Blender section on the Panda3D manual too.

2

I don’t think the Chicken docs should be in the Panda manual, it’s an unofficial project so it might not have a place there. You don’t run the .py script by itself, you have to install it into blender’s script folder. Under windows this is in “Documents and Settings<user>\Application Data\Blender Foundation\Blender.blender\scripts”. Unzip the contents of the archive there and the next time you run blender you will be able to export to a .egg assuming your blender install can run python scripts.

3

Hi!

I unzipped the folder in the blender scripts folder and it now shows up in my Blender export options.

But when I try to export a simple cube, it says:
chicken_interface could not be imported. Chicken will not work without this module.
The reported error was: The Chicken interface requires a full Python installation. Cannot continue

What should I do now? Sorry for these noob questions.

4

Did you extract the entire archive and not just the first py file? Also the subdirectories?

5

Yes. I extracted all the files and the sub directories too.

6

The ‘reported error’ says you do not have python - you need to do a separate installation. Head over to python.org and download and install it, you will need version 2.6.1 rather than 3.0.1. I’ll have to admit that I don’t know why Chicken requires a full python installation, and personally think it shouldn’t, but right now it demands that. Most of the rest of us don’t know because we installed python separately at some point and so it just works. (And I don’t have any computers without python to find out why this is the case on.)

7

Alternatively, pointing blender to Panda’s python installation worked fine for me.

8

Hi!

After a bit of searching, I found out how to manually set the python path in Blender. Here’s a link to the post I found.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread?t=7412
Look at eeshlo’s comments for setting the path.

Thanks everyone!

9

I had the same problem myself, but The trick is, you have to extract directly into the scripts folder in the Blender folder.

10

That is where you normally put ALL blender scripts.