[Blend2cs-user] blend2cs conversion story
Thomas Degris
blend2cs-user@blender.org
Tue, 22 Jul 2003 19:05:36 +0200
Hello,
I wanted to show the different possibilities of CrystalSpace to the
people of my team that were using blender as a 3D editor but also as a
real time engine. Since the real time engine if not anymore available in
Blender, they are interesting in moving to a new real time engine. So, I
asked them to send me one of their blender files, to check how the
conversion works. So, here is the different steps of this conversion, I
think it may be representative of what people can experience if they are
trying to convert their Blender maps to CS maps.
1) So, I first get the latest source of blend2cs, after some emails to
this mailing list, I discover I have to use the blend2cs tool and not
blendconv. Compiling it was easy and I got the binary working quite fast.
2) After some reading in the documentation, I learn that blend2cs
doesn't extract the textures packed in the blend file. It is not a very
big map, so I decided to extract the textures manually from the UV
mapping menu of Blender and put them in a textures folder. You can find
the blender file and the textures folder in the bz2 file :
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question.tar.bz2
3) So, now everything is ready for me to convert the map. I am using the
following command :
# blend2cs -t textures/ question.blend world
warning: object OBPlane.019 has no UV coordinates assigned, using dummy
texture.
warning: object OBCube.009 has no UV coordinates assigned, using dummy
texture.
warning: object OBNuke has no UV coordinates assigned, using dummy texture.
Skipping Camera 'OBCamera': cameras as parent/child objects not
supported yet.
The last line makes me verify if there is a camera somewhere in the
world file. That is not the case, so I go back to Blender to remove the
parents of the camera and I save the file under question_camera.blend,
you can find it at :
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question_camera.tar.bz2
4) So, I am retrying to convert the map by using the same kind of command :
# blend2cs -t textures/ question_camera.blend world
warning: object OBPlane.019 has no UV coordinates assigned, using dummy
texture.
warning: object OBCube.009 has no UV coordinates assigned, using dummy
texture.
warning: object OBNuke has no UV coordinates assigned, using dummy texture.
These are only warnings, so I decide to make the zip file to be able to
load the map with walktest :
# zip question_camera01.zip world textures/*
# walktest -relight question_camera01.zip
After this command, walktest starts and then just stops whitout an error
message (only warnings about some textures files). The output file of
walktest can be found at :
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/walktest01.txt
and the zip file at :
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question_camera01.zip
The thing is I would have expect to be able to walk into the scene (with
some missing textures) but I just got nothing : walktest exists with no
error message.
5) After some debugging of CS, it seems that CS stops to load the map
because of the OBCube.009 mesh that doesn't have any parameters (line
633 of the world file). So, I remove the mesh directly from world file
to check if it changes something and then.... yeeeeaaaaah the map is
loaded by walktest. Here is the command I run :
# zip question_camera02.zip world textures/*
# walktest -relight question_camera02.zip
The output file of walktest and the zip file can be found at :
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/walktest02.txt
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question_camera02.zip
6) The bad thing is there lot of bugs in the drawing. I fix few problems
of textures by modifing the world file and some file names. You can find
the zip file at :
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question_camera03.zip
and some screenshot of the scene with the bugs rendered by CS at :
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/cs_screenshot01.jpg
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/cs_screenshot02.jpg
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/cs_screenshot03.jpg
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/cs_screenshot04.jpg
So, I don't know if I did something wrong or if it comes from blend2cs
(or even CrystalSpace).
As a conclusion, I would say blend2cs is going to be a good tool. I hope
this email will help the authors to debug it. Of course, the best would
be that the output of blend2cs outputs a zip file (as map2cs does) that
is able to be loaded directly by CS. I think I will wait some more weeks
before using Blender as a CS editor but it will be definitly a good way
of making maps when this will be fully functional.
Best of lucks to the developer and thank you for working on such tools,
Thomas