[Bf-scripts-dev] Collada updates

[contactme at mikaellagre.com]

I have released version 0.4 of the Blender COLLADA Plug-in at
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/colladablender/

This version includes animation export of underformable objects though IPO
channels. It can export animation of transforms and materials. The baked
transform options outputs baked transforms for each frame beginning with
the lowest transformation frame to the highest frame number for any
transformation channel. The animation exporter calculates time values
according to the frame number of each key-frame (Bezier-point) depending
on the FPS value found in the Scene-Anim settings (defaults to 25).

This version also fixes the texture import on the importer and issues a
warning if the texture could not be loaded and continues to load the
document in any case.

What this version does not include is armature support and animation
import. This will hopefully be included in the next release. It's not that
I decided to skip these features into this version, I simply didn't have
enough time to include them. Also I wanted to release whatever I got
before Blender 2.41.

I have tested XML validations on each documents I have created and I have
also tested to import the scene and animation into Maya with good results!
Although the Maya importer seems to default the FPS to 24 so setting the
FPS to 24 and export from Blender generates the same time values when
importing into Maya. Well not that anyone would like to move from Blender
to Maya anyway... ;)



Some thoughts that occured to me when working with the API is:

1) Collada supports curve interpolation methods on each key-frame but
Blender only supports interpolation for each curve?

2) I can't get Xmin and Xmax values from the API.

3) What is getRctf()? Bounding box on what?


Also some features I would like to see (unless there already is a solution
and I'm to lazy to find it) ;)

1) If I want to import a .dae file there should be a special function to
highlight .dae files (that is draw a orange square for .dae files) from
the FileSelector window instead of drawing them on .blend files. Or if
possible only display .dae files.

2) Is it possible to raise exceptions that can be caught internally by
Blender? How does others scripts handle errors that are not python errors?
It would be nice to have error handling through the API or raising an
exception that is handled by Blender.
Through the API there could be for example Draw.DrawScriptWarning( 'Could
not load texture %s' % (source), 'Check if texture exist' ). I'm not sure
if this is a good idea but error handling is hard as it is and consistent
error handling through python and Blender would be great.

/Mikael Lagré