Ok, zuck: All the bugs you have reported are fixed. It was a single line - I had assumed uv coordinates were only written in one place - it appears that in fact there not and you were highlighting cases where it was taking a different branch. One line after all that…
The issue with multiple objects sharing materials but using different default uv names is still there - I’m not going to rush to fix that as its only an issue for people using Blender as a level editor, easy to work around and a pain to fix.
For everybody: A new release is up, R56 - find it over on the sourceforge site.
I have another questions. Here is a model of an airplane in Blender. I use texture face panel to set alpha sort + add for several face on canopy.
In other words, I have a model that uses 1 material + texture with alpha channel. My question is in Panda3d will it be rendered automatically with alpha sorting and add mode, if I export it with Chicken Exporter? I am not a Panda3d programmer, I am a modeller right now. So, this is why I ask the question instead of trying out.
It should work fine, presuming alpha is on for the texture, which I think is what you mean (Its only the alpha option in the ‘map to’ part of the texture setup on the material that matters.), however…
You have a large amount of geometry there that isn’t transparent, but will be handled as though it is, which is rather inefficient. You would be better off having two objects, one a child of the other, one for the solid parts of the plane, the other for the transparent parts (Cockpit), with only the transparent parts having an alpha channel on the texture.
was just about to ask if that isnt a macross figther. where is ranka? i totaly love her and her cute cellphone. nice model btw
.for the transparent part you might also want to use vertex-color baseed transparency. its more robust.
I was having some other problems with vista so I had my OS changed to windows XP. After reinstalling blender, panda, python, and chicken r56 everything seems to be working. However I am still not having any success exporting animations. In blender I have a bone controlling a vertex group that is part of Suzanne. When I select suzanne and export using Chicken, things seem to work fine. Status line says “no apparent problems”, and I am getting an Animations line. But the animations line does not have the start/end frames that I a have set in my animation. When I actually export I do not get a file with the model and one with the animation. Only one file is created, the model file. What am I doing wrong, and how can I get the animation to actually export?
What do you mean by ‘animations line’? If you mean the line in the Chicken gui that gives the animation details then you have to set that yourself, independently of Blender, as that allows it to work regardless of the animation technique your using. If your not getting a second file then that means two possible things - you could have ‘single file’ switched on, in which case the animation goes into the same file as the mesh (I’m planning to make that the default for the next release, if nobody has any objections, but with R56 it defaults to off.), or something has gone wrong. Hard to say what from your description, so several suggestions, in the order you should try them:
Try and export an animation that is known to work - Chicken doesn’t accept all ways of setting up an animation, especially when it comes to parenting of the armature (Don’t) and how its connected (Use the modifier). Also, make sure every vertex has at least one armature assigned to it - I’m not sure what would happen otherwise, but I imagine it would be bad. For an example (But simple) file that works you can try export-char-simple.blend from subversion - you can download that from chicken-export.svn.sourceforge.n … unk/tests/ If it works then work out the differences between your animation and that one! (I really need to put up a more complex example though - that one only has one bone.)
Run blender from the command line, so you can check for it outputting errors, then report them to me.
If its ok with you then you can send the file to me and I can try and figure out what is wrong - this will isolate if its a problem specific to your computer if it works fine for me. It usually gets fixed before it gets this far though;-)
Yes, I do mean the line that gives you the animation details, single file was not turned on, and I will try to give a better description of what I did. At the moment I am just trying to verify that I can get an animation to export out of blender, so I am trying to keep things as simple as possible by using the default cube.
-In edit mode I select the top four vertices of the cube, create a new vertex group called ‘Top’, and assign those vertices to the group. I do the same thing for the bottom four vertices and name that group ‘Bottom’.
-Then I an armature near the top vertices and name it AR:Top, OB:Top. In the deform options I turn envelopes off, and in the editing option I turn X-ray on.
-I select the cube, make sure that the ‘Top’ vertex group is selected, and add an armature modifier. I assign the armature modifier to OB:Top and VGroup:Top, and turn envelopes off.
-At this point if I try to move the bone in posemode it does not effect the cube at all. To fix this I select the cube>edit mode> select ‘Top’ vertex group> and go into weight painting mode, where I paint the vertices I want effected by the bone. After I do this the cube is effected when I move the bone in posemode.
-I repeat these steps to get the ‘Bottom’ vertex group working as well.
-Then I make a simple animation in the action editor, loc locking each bone in a few different locations.
-Now I go back to frame one and select the cube in object mode and try to export it using chicken r56. (I noticed that when I open the exporter the command window for blender tells me that “Settings for export not. Using defaults”)
-In the chicken GUI I have both the status tab and the animations tab. Under Status tab I line the gives me the details of the export file location. Under the animations tab I have nothing until I hit the add animation button. When I add an animation only tangents and binormals is on.
-Then I define the start and end, name it the animation, define the export location, and export. When I export an Object mesh is the only file created in the folder or shown in the command window.
When I tried to export the Dummy model from the export-char-simple.blend my results were as follows:
-Under the animation tab in chicken several different lines of animation details appeared. Each line had a different start and end frame as well as different name. Whereas exporting from the blender file that I created gives me an animations tab with no details below it.
-When I exported the file only one .egg file was created: an object mesh.
SInce exporting from my file or yours seemed to give me the same results, I assume that the problem is not having the “settings for export” found.
How can get the program to find the export settings?
And am I setting up my armature correctly?
Ok, firstly, the “settings for export” thing isn’t a problem - Chicken allows you to set default options for the buttons if you typically don’t use the defaults - I get the same message on mine. Its also obviously the case that something is going wrong, and I am going to need more information as the problem is specific to your computer, so there is no opportunity for me to debug it myself. This might involve quite a bit of back and forth, and probably a fair bit of guesswork, so:
What version of Blender and what version of Python are you using? (I presume the latest Panda, though that probably doesn’t matter.)
When you export a file does the export window stay up? It should, but as you’ve never seen it before you might not realise that it vanishing when you hit export is wrong… and that is precisely what it does when it crashes.
And now the most important bit - run through the Chicken exporter until you have this single file output and then get me a copy of everything than has been spit out to the command line - if it is crashing it should include precisely where the crash occured. It should also include further warnings and any error messages, and generally point me in the right direction.
Python Version 2.5.2
(when I first tried to get chicken to work I had 2.6.1 installed, but blender’s command window was telling me that it was not able to find python. When I downgraded to 2.5.2 blender started finding python again.)
2.)>>>>>-----
The chicken window stays up after I export.
3.)>>>>>-----
When I export it says this:
[Object “Mesh”]
If I try exporting again, it says:
[Object “Mesh.001”]
Would it be easier or faster to do this over email?
I don’t think e-mail would make this easier or faster, but it would reduce forum clutter. But then this thread is primarily used for this sort of thing anyway. thaines@gmail.com if you want.
I was really hopping for a crash - that makes life so much easier… there are few harder bugs than once you can not yourself replicate that are silent.
One quick question: Chicken has a status line - does it say ‘exported successfully’ when its done?
What I’ll now do is try and replicate - I think my version of python on my XP machine is older but it should be the same version of Blender. I suspect that will fail however, or more accurately work fine for me, and I will have to produce some kind of debug version and get you to tell me what messages it provides. It will be shear guesswork as to what is wrong however, and will probably involve even more backwards and forwards stuff as I narrow down the problem.
Actually, even though the command line says that only the mesh got exported, I see an anim.egg file here too. I just tested it in panda and it looks as thought the animation is working. I am going to try a few more things later tonight to make sure that this success was not a fluke.
