Hi. I’m a newbie using Panda3D and Chicken. I am currently using Chicken R59, and I have a couple of animations with my model. This may seem like a dumb question, but I am not sure how to access the animations in Panda3D once I load in the model. Like what would be the filepath to access the animations if I have an animation called “left” and “strike” for an object that are all saved in the single file planet.egg. Example code below:
I just had a look at the manual and it doesn’t mention that animations can be stored in the same file as the mesh… I’m just thinking that maybe it should, otherwise this question is going to be repeated.
Anyone have any thoughts on this matter? (Or indeed is willing to do it - I know its a wiki but I’ve never touched the manual! Maybe its time I started…)
I’ve just added a small note.
The fact that it isn’t documented is because no-one uses it. I think most people load the animations separately for most cases, since it also allows the animations and models to be replaced separately (especially useful if you have different modelers and animators working on the game).
I set the default behaviour of Chicken a few releases ago to export a single file on the grounds that would be better for newbies - I see the multifile capabilities as something more advanced for people who want it and hence will be willing to press a button and switch it off!
Considering what the manual says it might make sense to revert however - the focus on the multifile method can evidently confuse people - any thoughts?
P.S. I use it. And I suspect nobody else uses it because nobody else knows that its there!
Well, as I said before I just don’t see the value - that is a film production technique, and is not so valuable for games, plus you can emulate the same functionality through several other techniques. The other issue is that the interface that Chicken is using might not expose the capability to do so anyway - I really don’t know how the proxy system works. If it matters that much to you send me an example of a proxy setup (thaines@gmail.com) and I’ll have a look at why Chicken isn’t working - it might be an easy fix, but I’m not willing to do anything too complex to get that running.
Apologies for using the wrong account - this forum access issue is just getting worse for me.
The default mode now is to export all animations into a single file with the mesh - you just load that file and all animations are automatically available under the names you gave them in Chicken. You can disable single file mode and switch it back into multiple file mode by toggling the ‘Single File’ button if you want that behaviour.
Ok, just uploaded a new Chicken release to sourceforge. Its just the addition of several provided and requested features:
– Ability to force texture paths to be relative, plus when forcing is disabled a warning is emitted if they are not - provided by forum member Aurilliance. I’ve defaulted this to on as it won’t affect people who have their files setup correctly.
– The tag ‘Collide’ is now turned into a collide tag in the egg file, allowing an alternative to the object type support that already exists - provided by forum member Aurilliance.
– Support for blenders stencil textures, admittedly rather limited. Works by abusing the alpha channel, due to Panda restrictions, so only the last texture can provide alpha to the final output - this probably makes this unusable where transparency is required. Because each texture uses up a texture stage, of which there are typically only 4, 2 colour layers and a single stencil layer consume 3 stages, making that the typical limit, which is quite restrictive. (pro-rsoft asked for this. I only tested under 64 bit Linux but for me I was limited to 4 texture stages, even when using the shader generator - it should be easy to uncap that and make this feature more valuable - you really need a minimum of 3 colour layers + shadow map, i.e. 6 texture stages, to get good terrain.)
– Bad tangents/bi-normals are detected and resolved by assigning an arbitrary tangent and bi-normal that are perpendicular to the normal. A warning is emitted when this occurs. (This has burnt at least two people that I know off - thought I’ld improve the handling.)
Douglas, I looked into what would be involved to get proxy animation support - its simply not going to happen I’m sorry to say. It would involve major edits to several parts of Chicken, including the somewhat hairy animation code; it also clashes with the current instancing support and would make instancing animated objects problematic, and I’m afraid instancing is more important than this. There are a lot of work arounds for this problem though, so I really don’t see this as a real problem.
lethe I guess it’s time to open another thread, this counts 11 pages!
seriously, I’d to say that this project have reached, besides an awesome richness of features, a mature stage so starting another thread will mark a line from the previous stage.
I would suggest also to pack the useful tests now in the trunk and put’em in download page beside the exporter release.
last thing: I need to use it as a batch but gave me an error:
992 if exporter.forceRelTex:
I successfully circumvented it commenting out that code block but I guess got to be fixed 'cos in batch mode exporter global does not exists.
I like the length of this thread… because its so absurdly silly:-) More importantly there is good information to be found in it at various points, so I don’t want to just get rid of it quite yet… and there is also a very sensible point to start a new thread coming up - the release of blender 2.5, which is going to require re-writting large chunks of the Chicken exporter, so I’ll do it then.
I’ld prefer not to make a test download file but let people just download what they need - the manual actually has a section on this and gives a link to the relevant page in the sourceforge svn browser. This also has the advantage that I don’t have to maintain such a package, as that page will just update as I add tests. (Which happens most releases, and often between releases as well.)
That bug is now on my todo list - I’ll have to admit that I don’t keep too close an eye on the background exporter - I never use it myself. It therefore doesn’t surprise me its a bit broken, but I doubt its anything too hard to fix.
dang, I also found that it do not export the animations either.
unfortunately for me I need badly and I need now, therefore I’m going to fix it
I’ll post the diff when job’s done
I have just discovered that egg-optchar (when called from Chicken) still expects animation to be exported as different file, and gives error otherwise being unable to load the non-existing animation file (now it exports model and animation in the same file by default, if you remember).
Ah, that doesn’t surprise me actually. You can defiantly force it back to multi-file mode in the gui, and via a configuration file, just not sure if you can via the background exporter. How are you getting on astelix? Some parts of Chicken are a total nightmare, and can be a real pain to work with. If you need any help, or just want to give up and let me do it, just ask.
thank you lethe but it is not that bad - as long as we stay stick with python language I guess I’ll have no problem to understand and fix it - my only problem is always the lack of time
There all in chicken_interface.py, which you can find in the bpymodules subdirectory of the scrips directory - you’ll note its included at the start of the file.
thanx - I find here some discrepancies between what stated in the manual:
and the line I posted above - that line is inside the class Background and it provides to initialize and feed the Exporter class with the data but I don’t see here or anywhere any reading of the environment variables passed by an eventual .bat file.
Do you confirm my guess or I’m missing something?
