www.blenderstorm.org is place to make feature requests for blender.
Didn’t know that - thanks:-) Feature request can be found here: blenderstorm.org/blenderstorm/idea/140/ Feel free to vote for it. Additionally the Collada maintainer says he will fix the tangent/bi-normal bug (See the above link), though I might end up doing it to get it in quicker.
Till we get blender 25 to panda working, could someone make node support for chicken. Node as in tree (for collisions).
Huge thanks to whoever does it!
What do you mean by node support? You can already export a hierarchy - you just have to select all nodes in it. It also supports most if not all of the collision stuff.
Oh nevermind, stupid me… I didnt select all objects…
I was curious about your noting offer to fix collada so I tried that link above, but I get this error:
ERROR
Artifact: Invalid ArtifactID
^ for blender dev page not the one listed in this quote.
I dont know if its a temporary server issue or what, but I thought I would mention it in case we need to look at alternatives.
cheers
nl
neigborlee, that link works just fine for me
The chicken exporter doesnt export vertices, nor does it export edges which do not form triangles. Why?
No idea - it has always been like that. I would not be surprised if the egg loader culls unused vertices though, which would of course make such a feature useless.
How about I try loading another format and see if it works?
And I can also try to use the something2egg programs on them and load the generated egg file.
Then well be sure.
EDIT: It looks like none of the formats exports vertices?? Or they are removed at Panda import. I tried dae, x, dxf, obj (crashed), lwo.
How can I be sure?
Unused vertices are indeed likely to be removed somewhere in the egg process. If you want points, you need to export vertices as usual, then reference them in a primitive elsewhere in the egg file.
David
sorry, i didnt notice you replied. What do you mean by reference?
Look at a regular egg file. See the lines that say something like:
<Polygon> { <VertexRef> { 1 2 3 <Ref> { vpool } } }? These are the primitives that reference the vertices. Without a primitive, a vertex is just a number.
If you want to render a point for a vertex, you need to reference it with a PointLight primitive, which looks a lot like the Polygon primitive syntactically:
<PointLight> { <VertexRef> { 1 2 3 <Ref> { vpool } } }This will create three points, corresponding to the vertex numbers 1, 2, and 3.
David
Oh, okay. Won’t I have ‘doubles’ then as well?
Don’t reference a particular vertex more than once.
isnt that too much hand editing?
I don’t expect you to create this file by hand. I expect the modeler or converter (e.g. Chicken) to do it. If the converter isn’t doing it correctly, then you have to solve that problem, either by (a) fixing the converter, or (b) writing a simple standalone program to create an egg file for you.
David
Oh. can you do that, lethe?
I consider Chicken to be depreciated at this point - I just can’t go back to 2.49 now that 2.5x is around, even though I can’t yet use 2.5x with Panda! (Well, except in a few limited cases - I’ve been using the gap in service to work on my modelling skills.) But adding new features to Chicken is just not happening, especially when its so esoteric, and its not like I have the time anyway.
Given that vertices are not rendered I am assuming you are using them as some kind of information for a level etc - your best bet might be to just write them to a custom file with a python script in Blender and to then load them with some python in your program. There are other ways of doing it, including modifying Chicken, but that is going to be super fiddly. Alternatively a python script in blender to convert the relevant vertices into empties might prove easiest, if a bit of a pain from a pipeline point of view.
I dont really like this whole idea of not updating Chicken because of Collada. My personal impression from the forum posts is that complete Collada support might not be finished in a year, or anytime soon. Also Blender 2.5 is still a beta software. It has been developed for so long that I can’t tell when it will be finished as well. Also the Collada plugin for Blender 2.5 is still far from perfect as well and will also need alot of editing. So I wouldn’t call Chicken a deprecated software myself. And there simply isn’t an alternative for it.
This is somehow frustrating for me as a Panda and Blender user. We have talked about this before, but I still can’t agree with that…