In simple terms in Blender 2.5 Chicken doesn’t work and the Chicken developers don’t plan on making it compatible. Is there any way to eggify data from the new Blender 2.5x series for use in Panda3D projects?
“Wait till end of year” isn’t really an acceptable workflow, really, because it is very futile to try and work on a game project when no model import of any kind is possible.
Unfortunately, there’s no real pipeline from Blender 2.5, only 2.49. A project was started recently aiming to create such an Egg exporter (it won’t be a Chicken port as that’s not possible) and Collada support is underway for Panda 1.8, but at the moment – Blender 2.5 is out of limits, sorry.
If Dimensionex has Blender 2.5 support it may win over my engine choice, despite my preference of Python over Java.
Why can’t you export to x format and import into Panda from the directX file type? Sure you have to go back through each frame and add a new keyframe to make it play animation correctly; but are there any other features that are missing?
For those that don’t know, you can go to the blender file menu and choose preferences, then plug-ins. In the search box, search for X, find the direct X file exporter and check the box and it’ll be available under the export menu.
Anyone had problems with this? I don’t have panda installed at the moment and haven’t tried, but as far as I know, this should work.
Just for completeness, thought this isn’t going to change anyone’s view - there is an extremely limited Blender 2.5 pipeline right now - export to Collada, and use the dae2egg tool in a recent build of Panda to convert to .egg. Only supports static meshes with basic materials however.
May I ask… What is the most current version of P3D? I’m still using 1.7.0 I believe and I’ve read somewhere that you can’t change to a higher version in the middle of a project because data would not be excepted by the new engine version.
As far as Blender, I already knew not to jump to 2.5. 2.4b wasn’t even working well, but I managed to fix all the imports and exports myself, so I’m sticking with Blender 2.4b for all P3D projects unless Blender gains something that’s a must have. There are errors in 2.4b and some of them you can avoid, but others will leave you hanging.
I find the work flow in Blender faster than that of Maya. I guess you can always upload a 2.5 Blender file into the 2.4 version and export from there.
I guess I’m suck with 1.7.0 since I started with it. Wish there were release notes with that 1.7.2. Would love to know the changes or fixes.
There are release notes…
panda3d.org/download.php?sdk&version=1.7.2
Click “Release Notes”.
Upgrading from 1.7.0 should not be a problem. You should just be careful with switching to a new major version, like 1.8.x.
I think the X format support is pretty limited, or the X format itself is limited.
Where?
While I’ll echo rdb’s caution, my project runs fine under 1.7.X and 1.8.X, with absolutely no changes. So, it’s not that it will always break, rather it may break, so you should be careful.
In general, as with all development, newer versions of libraries often break things, but you’re never ‘stuck’ with one version. It’s just how much effort you have to put into making it work. With Panda3D, I rarely have issues. (I have apps written for 1.6 that run on 1.8 devel)
Actually, this is the exact pipeline I’m using for content at the moment. I don’t have any animation to worry about (currently), so going from blender, to .x to .egg works perfectly. (it does like to chew up ram doing the conversion, but that’s hardly a show-stopper)
Personally, I have less issues with this than I had with chicken.
Keep in mind that 1.8.x is still in active development and may change drastically before 1.8.0 is actually released.