Thanks for taking the time to fix the zip file for Linux users psiberpunk, it’s nice see some real support for a script.
I’m a bit sad to say however that this didn’t fix my problem, as I still get the same error dump as in 5 posts up.
Could it be that the script doens’t work right because I didn’t install Blender correctly? I just downloaded and unpacked it in my home folder.
Could be. I tried to reproduce this problem but I just haven’t had any luck. Where exactly is your scripts folder? Is it ‘home//.blender/scripts’ or is it somewhere else? Is that where you unzipped Chicken? Did you preserve the folder hierarchy from the zip file?
Do other Blender scripts run properly?
well, the structure in the zip is like this:
-bpydata
-chicken
*.png
chicken_config.py
doc.html
-bpymodules
chicken_interface.py
chicken_exportR44.py
and my home//.blender/scripts folder looks like this:
-bpydata
-config
*.txt
*.txt
-scripts
*.py
so if I unzip your zip in the .blender folder the .py script doens’t end up in the scripts folder and if I unzip the whole thing in the scripts folder, the bpydata doesn’t end up in the right place it seems.
I tried both locations, but in the first, the script doesn’t show up in the script list and from the scripts folder it crashes blender.
This was the first blender script I have tried so far, all other scripts seem to be shortcuts to a non-existent folder in /usr/lib/blender
Hi there,
I have the same R44 vesion and inside the zipfile after extraction you have in order:
bpydata
bpymodules
chicken_extractR44.py
Those should be extracted DIRECTLY into /home/youruser/.blender/scripts <
directly into the scripts folder.
cheers 
nl
I think the 44 deleted some of other python files in the pydata now lots of importers and scripts don’t run.
up on investigation what happed was that the folders were soft links so the unzipping replaced them gar! I build blender from source so that i can get panda3d running inside of blender 
Sorry if this was a topic that was already brought up by a different person… But my chicken won’t lay.
~cough~ Right, to clarify… I made a model of a worm (actually just a line of spheres meant to look a little like a worm… maybe that’s why the chicken won’t eat it?) with an animation that makes it wiggle. Chicken will export the model, but it won’t export the wiggle animation. My Chicken is version R42 and I do have Python fully installed, so I must have made a mistake when animating the model.
First of all, when I was making the animation, the tutorial I was following told me to parent the model to the armature. Yes, I found out later that Chicken doesn’t accept that. So I unparented the model. But Chicken still won’t lay the animation. So my question is… is there any way to save my animation? If I have to start over, can someone link me a good tutorial for making armature animations the Chicken-kosher way? Thanks in advance.
Just make your armature and your mesh, and instead of parenting, you select just your mesh, then go to Modifiers, and add an Armature Modifier.
Thank you! That’s exactly what I will do.
psiberpunk started helping me try to fix it. And actually, the problem turned out being something completely different that I hadn’t thought of. I finally decided to change the directory I was exporting the file to, and voila! It worked!
Thanks psiberpunk for helping me with this problem. Great job creating Chicken, by the way. It’s an excellent tool.
I’m stuck right now with the same problem, I exported an animated model I made from scratch with no problem, but another one that had mesh-armature parenthood didn’t work, so I cleared parent of both and added armature-modifier to the mesh, chicken doesn’t recognize the animation and exports as static scene.
I’m trying to find a way to make it work, but any help about this would be great
Edit: I’ve found that a subsurf modifier was somehow messing with the exporting of the animation. I guess I will apply the subsurf before I export, but being just a humble beginner, I don’t know if it’s logical or expected to behave like that
Just an observation/feature request:
The chicken exporter is using egg-trans to generate the relevant tangent and bi-normal info, when the method blender uses to calculate that is different. At least, for faces adjacent to seams the normals are wrong when rendered in panda, and don’t match up at all over the seam. (Obviously seems are never perfect and are best hidden, but this is a case where it could be better.) I presume a difference between blenders and pandas methods of calculating the tangents and bi-normals is responsible.
I suspect this can be fixed, or at least improved, if you can query blender to get the tangent and bi-normal information its calculated from it direct and use that instead. Of course, that is dependent on Blender exposing that capability to your script, about which I have no idea, but if possible this would certainly be the preferred method.
Thanks for chicken btw, it works brilliantly, and these new features are going to save me some time:-)
Well, it didn’t actually cross my mind to look into Blender’s own tangent and binormal calculation methods but now that I have, prompted by your post, it appears that its results are not accessible from Python scripts. I guess the egg-trans method will have to do for now.
I will keep this in mind, and look out for it in future Blender releases. Maybe it even warrants taking the time to make a patch of my own and submit it.
@eric48k
If you have an Armature modifier on a mesh, the effects of any other modifiers cannot be exported. This is a Blender limitation more than it is Chicken’s (since R44 static models support any modifier) because I can’t get the weights of vertices other than those from the cage (unmodified) mesh.
However, this should not interfere with exporting an animated mesh. It will just show up as a warning in the report page.
If you continue to have this problem I extend to you the same offer I make to everyone else with this sort of issue: you can send me your .blend file via e-mail (its included with the script and I’d rather not reproduce it here for fear of spam) and I’ll tell you what is wrong (be that your mistake or a bug in Chicken, like in dreamsavior’s case). Perhaps even if you’ve solved your problem it would be useful to other Chicken users that you send me a file that can reproduce the original problem so I can see what went wrong and how I can make that situation a little less confusing for others.
It would be wonderful to have install instructions in the chicken DOC.HTML
I had a very hard time getting it to work in Kubuntu. It works now though but the first try it took out all my other exporters!!! I had to guess where everything went and now it works but for only one user. It would be nice to have it also work for others on my system but I have no idea how to do that.
Thanks, Great tool!!
Douglas
It really didn’t occur to me that people would have trouble installing Chicken considering it’s basically the same as installing any other Blender script, though instead of just moving it to your scripts directory, you unzip it because it’s more than one file.
First, I would say that I have it installed and working but it was not so easy for me. First off I did not know where the directory was that it needed to be unzipped into. On my Kubuntu there are a lot of places it could go but 2 main ones. First it could go in the Sudo area of the system (user/lib/blender/scripts) so that all my users could use it, second it could go in any of the HIDDEN files at /home/user/.blender/scripts
The next problem is that just unzipping it in scripts does not work. I needed to pull out the bpdata and the other folder bpmoduls (which are links in the users scripts director!) and the program and put them into 3 places. I am still not sure it is totally right because there are on nice looking graphics like in your example pictures but it does make eggs so that is good.
Also it took me a bit to see that you had an HTML file stuffed in there in one of the directories. It should be on the top level or in a directory called docs or README or something. One other thing I would say is that I had to get some little bit of help because I had never used Pview and it comes up with all white models until you press the L key. At first I thought that your program was at fault for this model with no color. Might be nice to have a warning and a link to the docs on the panda3d site.
Thanks,
Douglas
psiberpunk. Welcome to the World of IT/Computer Programming/Being the knowledgeable computer guy 
Trust me from 32 years of working with computers from the time I was 16, NEVER ASSUME that any person will know what you are talking about. Especially when you are communicating with written words,describing a basically visual object as you are here with panda.
Good luck.
Chicken isn’t working here. First I tried with my own model and animation, but only the model got exported. Then as a sanity check I also tried the test scene with the same result.
Blender 2.45
Chicken R44
- open fleur.blend
- model object is selected
- export
- no warnings, no complaints in console window
- accept default export options (one animation on the list)
- after export only fleur.bam and fleur.egg have been created
- /me stumped
I really wanted to play with this stuff 
Apparently there’s something screwy about the file naming.
This is what the script proposes as the target filename when exporting
from F:\Blender-2.45.blender\test-modelR42\fleur.blend:
F:\Blender-2.45.blender\test-modelR42\fleur.egg
If I accept that, here’s the result:
F:\Blender-2.45.blender\test-modelR42\fleur.egg
F:\Blender-2.45.blender\test-modelR42\fleur.bam
F:\Blender-2.45.egg
If I change the target filename to F:\fleur.egg, then everything
works correctly.
Yeah, that’s a bug in a Blender utility function for making filenames with different extensions. I’ve found a way to bypass it and it’ll be fixed in my next release.
@Douglas: Frankly I’d rather the spend the little spare time I have working on Chicken itself rather than writing readme files, especially for such obscure setups. You’re welcome to contribute your own documentation however, and I’ll credit you for it if you do.