Because a lot of people are waiting to see animaton support in the plug-in, I thought it would be a good idea to know what you people think is most important.

Please let me know!

- Pieter

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Pieter Visser

Developer of the Collada 1.4 Plug-in for Blender

The important feature I'm searching for is export/(import) bone animation and armatures.

If this works, please let me know...

I'm working on it

(exporing armatures/skining at the moment)

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Pieter Visser

Developer of the Collada 1.4 Plug-in for Blender

This plugin looks really nice. Im especially exited about the skin and bones exporter features. Please let me know how I can help/test.

Thanks ,

Do you use other programs besides Blender for 3D animation?

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Pieter Visser

Developer of the Collada 1.4 Plug-in for Blender

No, to be honest with you Im looking at collada as a way to import models into my game engine (which Im currently in the progress of making), so I'm really not that experienced 3d modeller/animator.

I've been working on a 'collada viewer', and run into some issues with the blender export of animation (I think... it could always be the FCollada framework, but that's used in Maya and Max ex/importers so...).

The main problem is that the keys aren't in increasing time order. That may be due to creating keys out of order (something like start with just a cube, set key at start, set key at end, set key in middle, something like that...). I haven't done that particular sample, but have done more complex stuff where I have jumped around the timeline, and gotten odd key ordering. I'm also not a Blender guy, so I'm just learning -- for instance, I don't know if there's a way to 'update' a key, I just effective add a new key over the old key to update. But, looks like doing that, jumping around the timeline to edit, the keys get out of order (I can't send you the resulting animations, unfortunately proprietary data, but you should be able to reproduce in <5 mins...).

That of course leads to the two side effects of the first key not guaranteed to be 0, and the last key not guaranteed to be [maxtime].

Is this a bug in the exporter? The spec doesn't make clear whether the keys are 'expected' to be in some sorted order, so obviously it COULD be out of order -- but looks like at the least, FCollada isn't sorting them for me.

I'm also posting similar Q on the FCollada forum.

-d

This should be fixed now, they are sorted in time increasing order.

The most important thing is not crashing on import if you have animations, which is what I'm getting here:
[colladablender.illusoft.com]



Edited 1 times. Last edit at 08/11/07 06:58PM by tgraupmann.

a request for animation...

peruse this:
<channel source="#eyebrow2_R-rotateX-sampler" target="eyebrow2_R/rotateX.ANGLE"/>

Now, would it be possible to target a 'transform' instead of 'rotateX.ANGLE'?
This would involve baking the matrices into the <node>'s.

So, <channel> is going to look like:
<channel source="#eyebrow2_R-sampler" target="eyebrow2_R/transform"/>

Just to make work with dae-importers somewhat easier
Only if possible

Thanks,
Tim K
[ascollada.org]