View Full Version : M15 Blender export: Future development plans
Michael Hartlef
08-03-2007, 14:31
Ok folks,
after I'm done with adding ForceFeedback to the TBDI module, I plan on adding these things for the export script:
1) Convert and copying textures with the help of the freeimage lib
2) Ability to set layers for each material
3) Ability to set layers for each mesh in a scene
4) Ability to have more then one material with a texture
5) Export of normals (optional for now, to give Petr something to test)
Suggestions are still welcome.
Cheers
Michael
Mike fantastic list. One thing that might save you some work, or move it to another area is file conversion. If you could work with Petr so m15 can support using other formats, like png, dds and jpg, then we would have a much nicer system.
The textures we create could be in a nicer smaller file with or without alpha information. Then we can use these same textures in Blender, M15 etc. So this way, a lot of duplicate files are not created in different formats all over the place.
If you wanted to prioritize, I would add layer support next. I can see how that will be very useful. Or to be able to export each layer separately as its own m15, which ever is easier for you. Both way would be welcome additions I can see for doing cool things like working ships, robots, cool environments, the list goes on and on.
Thanks for sharing your ideas and making the list. I am glad I tried doing a layered export, because now I can see how valuable that addition will be. It is lots of work to work around it right now.
Mike, another cool thing if you can too is:
When I assign a color to a mesh in Blender, and do not use a texture, the color is not exported. I just get a default white or near white color.
We can also assign colors to individual faces in blender, that would be neat if that could be exported too.
Could do alot with that alone and not use any textures. Thanks.
Michael Hartlef
09-03-2007, 08:39
Mike, another cool thing if you can too is:
When I assign a color to a mesh in Blender, and do not use a texture, the color is not exported. I just get a default white or near white color.
We can also assign colors to individual faces in blender, that would be neat if that could be exported too.
Could do alot with that alone and not use any textures. Thanks.
thanks for your suggestions. I will think about it. No color export? I allways export the color of a material. Or does your mesh has no materials assigned?
Mike, I assign it a material, but no texture. I just assign the diffuse color in the material panel, but it gets lost in the export. It is confusing, I will make a video when I get home tonight to show the steps. Maybe we can catch what I am doing wrong then.
Michael Hartlef
09-03-2007, 18:20
Yes, I will do the same. Off to download camstudio :)
Mike, I made a simple cube and it worked. I don't know why it didn't work the other day. This is great to know. If I run into the problem again I will record, but it is working fine, WOO HOO!!!
Michael Hartlef
09-03-2007, 19:32
Ok, here is a little video, camstudio is really nice.
http://www.wegetitright.de/blenderM15ExportColoredMesh.zip
ErosOlmi
09-03-2007, 20:44
wow, another mother tongue English.
My pronunciation is so bad compared ...
Michael Hartlef
09-03-2007, 20:57
Mother tongue? No, but the daily training with my wife (she's american) helps a lot. I think now in english, you could say it became my favorite language.
Mike, you are a pro and natural for making videos. I will be bothering you for many more to learn from your knowledge. I wish we could get Eros and Petr to talk in their's too. Everyone knows it is not your first language, but it is always nice to hear the voice with the videos. Besides it makes it a lot easier to explain what the viewer is watching.
But Mike, great job. You have a very pleasant sound and good teaching voice and style. The video was really good quality too. I noticed you saved it as an avi and not a wmv. What did you use for compression?
At the 3d Buzz forums, they had a contest for video tutorial presentations. It was very interesting to watch all of them as they each covered different topics and they all did a great job. One of the guys also made one about making video tutorials. Over at 3dbuzz they use xvid or vidx codecs as open source and it makes avery nice small but clean file.
I just use wmv, as everyone as it. Not everyone knows how to use xvid or wants to get it. But maybe as it becomes so popular we should switch to that too. They can make a nice video about 1/2 hour long with audio for around 13 megs, which is phenomenal!!
Anyways thanks for the video. More please. I hope to be making many more, and not just about projects but life around here. I am just waiting to buy a new digital camera with nice video capture quality. I would love to see vids of you guys and your towns and neighborhoods. Too.
Well back to programming. I hope to have something I hope you find useful soon.
Oops forgot to put the link to the video tutorials in case you guys are interested.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=147166
I watched them all so here are the topics in each one in case you don't want to watch all of them.
Mr Charisma: Very good presenter, he has many more tutorials on java, looks like a neat language. His topic for the contest was OpenGL in Java, so it fits in nicely with our work. Really good job.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_dl...harisma_665.zip
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Dany27227: He shows something in 3D Max that you go, know way I can do that, but when you watch his very nice presentation you see how to do cloth, and cool hdri lighting in an animation.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_dl...ny27227_138.zip
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Captain Falafel: Phenomenal job. In 20 minutes of restricted time for the Reason 3.0 Demo, he does a superb job in showing off this complex program. I will be saving up for Reason now. It looks great now that I have an idea of what it is. I had downloaded a Demo awhile back, but was overwelmed by it and couldn't do anything. This video makes it easy to see how it works.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_dl...Falafel_820.rar
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Steven Hughes: It was hard to select a winner in my mind. But I gave it Steven Hughes. I am not a maya user or really used it other than tinkering a bit with the PLE version. But his presentation had it all. First, I love when they show you what the video will be about, a finished project and what you will create. He mentions the offscreen shortcut keys and actions that we can't see, that is so important in video tutorials and of course he has a really calm nice presentation style. His topic is doing a shock absorber between the wheel and body chassis in a wishbone suspension system. Again, you get to see a complicated process and feel like you could follow along and do it too.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_dl...nhughes_001.rar
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Fredrik Frost: Another great video about doing a complex lighting rig. Again he takes a complicated operation and makes it easy to understand and follow along. You know that if you followed along you would get similar results.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_dl...ikFrost_001.rar
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FrankieV: He made 2. One about making video tutorials, I recommend it to get a good overview. He also picked a very tough subject matter which lost me. Morphing things in Max. Since he didn't show what the end result you were towards, I got lost in the project and doubt if I could follow along and complete this tutorial. Again it is very advanced stuff, but the other 2 guys took advanced stuff and it was easy to understand. Still interesting to see advanced topic to see what can be done.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_dl...rankieV_754.rar
Michael Hartlef
10-03-2007, 08:54
Thanks Kent, I think I used the Microsoft MPEG-4 codec (75% quality), don't know if it was version 1 or 2. I was playing with others after that but forgot to write down which one I used exactly. For audio I used plain PCM compression with 22kHz and 16bit mono. But the lossless codec is great, it just produces way to big files. Do you know about the program VirtualDub? It is great to make conversions.
And again, thanks for the links. A lot to watch. :)
Petr Schreiber
10-03-2007, 10:00
Hi Mike,
your english is really good :o
Kent thanks a lot for the links, I will try to see at least some of the videos.
Bye,
Petr
Virtual Dub is awesome, but since I started using wmv, I haven't used it as much. If we go to xvid, then virtual dub is definitly a good choice.