[Blend2cs-user] blend2cs conversion story

[Thomas Degris]

Hello everybody,

after some talks with MatzeB (its nickname on IRC), he fixed some bugs 
in blend2cs (and in CrystalSpace) to get the conversion working. So, 
here is the map computed in Blender (in OpenGl):
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question_blender.jpg
and the map rendered with CrystalSpace:
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question_cs01.jpg

So, it works well. However, there is some bugs as you can see for the 
entry of the tunnel on the right and the swimming pool also on the 
right. I think it comes from the properties of the materials defined in 
CrystalSpace (like transparency). There is also some weard things at the 
right of the scene :
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question_cs02.jpg

Also, when CrystalSpace is loading, I got the following error message 
about a strange textures called 'no' (I don't think there is a texture 
of that name in the Blender file) :
crystalspace.maploader: Could not find material 'no'. Creating new 
material using texture with that name
crystalspace.maploader: Could not find texture 'no'. Attempting to load.
crystalspace.maploader.parse.image: Could not open image file 'no' on VFS!
crystalspace.maploader.parse.texture: Couldn't load image 'no', using 
checkerboard instead!

You can find the CrystalSpace map at:
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~degris/crystal/question_cs.zip

I hope this will help you,

Cheers,

Thomas

Thomas Degris wrote:

> 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
>
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