blender-exporter

Blender python scripts/addons and Rust powered tooling for exporting data such as meshes and armatures from Blender

Initial Background / Motivation

Before this module I would export blender mesh / armature data to COLLADA using blender's collada exporter, and then parse that COLLADA into JSON.

This worked mostly well - but here and there I'd run into a model that didn't export quite right and I'd have to dig around to figure out why.

After a year or two of this occasionally happening.. I finally decided to invest some time in writing something myself, knowing that I'd still run into issues here and there, but they'd be issues that I'd know how to address.

The goal of blender-exporter is to be a minimal suite of heavily tested, well documented tooling for getting data out of Blender and a set of functions for pre-processing that data so that you can make use of it in your rendering pipeline.

From the beginning blender-exporter will be targeted towards my needs for my game Akigi, but please feel very free to open issues / PRs with questions / thoughts / functionality that you think might fit into blender-exporter.

The goal is that getting data out of Blender and into your rendering pipeline becomes easy as pie.

Getting Started

blender-exporter is in need of more documentation and hand holding around how to integrate it into your pipeline.

For example, all of the tooling uses Rust right now, so if you want to run any of the existing pre-processing functions such as triangulating your mesh you need Rust installed.

So we need a binary with a CLI that you can use to interface with the API without needing Rust. As well as examples of integrating the tooling into your non-Rust application via foreign function interface... WebAssembly... etc.

But for now.. Take a look at the [mesh-visualizer](/mesh-visualizer) directory to see a full working example of implementing skeletal animation with models that were exported using blender-exporter`.

Running the mesh visualizer locally

git clone https://github.com/chinedufn/blender-exporter
npm start

Your web browser should open up with an application that allows you to visualize all of the model's in our test suite.

Contributing

Please open issues explaining your intended use case and let's see if we should or shouldn't make blender-exporter support it.

Also feel free to open issues with any questions / thoughts that you have!

Usage

// TODO ...

CLI Usage

# TODO ...

To test

cargo test --all

See Also

• blender-iks-to-fks

License

MIT