Collada format, plugin to blender
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One major problem with developing media for Ember is that there is no smooth workflow yet. If you use blender or 3DS you have to export to the ogre xml format, then tweak the xml files, renaming materials etc. And then compile the xml into a .mesh file, which needs to be loaded into Ember. Not that smooth.
It would be so much better if there was a clear path between blender/3ds and ember, preferrably in real time. The Collada project has been created to alliviate these problems. Basically, it's a huge project with the goal of designing an interchangeable format for all kind of assets needed when building applications in 3d. Some big players are participating in it, most notably Sony which intends to use Collada as the default format for the upcoming PS3.
What makes is a bit more interesting is the work done by nfz over at the Ogre team. Read this post. -
That was me posting without being logged in.
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Collada seems to be mostly a scene graph format; does that actually help us much, given that our scene graph is entirely determined by run-time data? (Unless we define buildings as client-side scenes). Or can it be used purely to make mesh / animation export easier? In which case I agree that would be great, since it's far too complex right now.
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It's much more than a scene graph format. The goal seems to be to be a format for defining almost everything needed for Digital Content Creation. So the scene graph tags are just one subset of it. It's very much possible to just use it for defining meshes or animations. The upcoming 1.4 release will also include definitions for GPU shaders, in both Cg, GLSL and HLSL.
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"Anonymous" said:One major problem with developing media for Ember is that there is no smooth workflow yet. If you use blender or 3DS you have to export to the ogre xml format, then tweak the xml files, renaming materials etc. And then compile the xml into a .mesh file, which needs to be loaded into Ember. Not that smooth.
Being an artist that wants to contribute to the WorldForge and the Open Source community this is perhaps the most frustrating part of the development, process. Currently I am working with a programmer to alleviate/solve this problem. We are utilizing a similar technique as the Yafray XML exporter, which can export multiple channels and various surfaces as well as procedural textures. No screenshots available yet but looks promising. It seems to be handling large amount of data too. -
I got the yafray importer to work wireframe. Its a 12 MB Blender scene, just had some probs eating all that XML. Plus the matrice math in Yafray is a little wierd.
viewtopic.php?t=3
Shaders/Materials next likely... more shots soon. -
with the realease of Blender 2.4 the collada plugin is being bundled I would like to see if could be an alternative exporter into worldforge games. For more information please visist http://sourceforge.net/projects/colladablender/
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"xrenmilay" said:with the realease of Blender 2.4 the collada plugin is being bundled I would like to see if could be an alternative exporter into worldforge games. For more information please visist http://sourceforge.net/projects/colladablender/
Work is already being done, http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13554, so I'll wait and see how that turns out.
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