Prev/Next Blog
by date

Blender DTS Exporter 0.96 Released

Name:	Joseph Greenawalt
Date Posted:	Apr 10, 2008
Rating:	5.0 out of 5
Public:	YES
Comments:	YES
RSS Feed:	or Subscribe with .
Profile Page:	View profile page for Joseph Greenawalt

Blog post

A new 0.96 version of the Blender DTS Exporter for Torque has now been released.
The new version requires Blender 2.44 or higher, and should be compatible with the upcoming Blender 2.46 release as well.

You can download the new exporter release on the exporter project site.

(edit - the project site release system is now miraculously fixed :-)

Be sure to check the Readme.html file included with the exporter if you are a new user, or if you run into problems.

What's New for version 0.96

* New: Added support for IFL (Image File List) animations.
* New: Improved support for mesh visibility animations. Visibility animations are no longer tied to materials, and can now be set up through the exporter GUI on a per mesh basis. Multiple meshes can be included in a single visibility animation, each having their own separate visibility track. IPO curves from objects or materials can be selected through the exporter GUI to drive each visibility track in the animation.
* New: Users can now set a start and end frame for actions (optional). This means that actions can now be set up using non-overlapping frame ranges, which allows for the use of objects as constraint targets for multiple animations. This feature is entirely optional, and must be enabled by turning off the "Auto Start/End Frames" button on the actions panel (can be set per-sequence).
* New: Sequence frames per second OR duration can now be set through the exporter GUI on a per sequence basis. If the FPS for a sequence is changed, the duration is automatically adjusted and vice-versa. Either of these settings can be "locked" such that when frames are added or removed from the animation, the locked setting (either duration or FPS) remains constant.
* New: Complete rework of the Sequences tab of the exporter. It now contains 4 sub-tabs:
....* Common/All - Contains settings that are common to all types of animations. Also contains a bar graph showing the length of each animation contained within a sequence (Actions, IFL, Visibility, etc.). The bar graph is designed to show, at a glance, whether the lengths of the animations contained in a sequence are the same.
....* Action - The Action panel contains settings that are specific to action animations
....* IFL - This panel is used to create Image File List animations.
....* Visibility - This panel is used to create Visibility animations.
* New: The exporter will now prompt the user if no shape marker is found. If the user chooses, a shape hierarchy will be automatically created and set up with a default detail level (size 1). The exporter guesses which meshes are collision meshes and los meshes by examining the first three letters of the mesh names (looking for "col" and "los"); everything else is placed under Detail1. This should make things a little easier for people who are using blender as a stepping stone to export purchased content or content imported from another modeling app. It might also save experienced users a few seconds creating and parenting empties.
* The effects of mesh modifiers are now applied to meshes in the exported dts file. The Blender modifiers themselves are not applied to your Blender objects. Unfortunately, due to a limitation in Blender's Python API, modifiers will be ignored for skinned meshes (you can still apply them by hand, however).
* Rearranged and relabeled controls on the "Materials" panel. The two most problematic settings (Reflectance Map and Bump Map) are now hidden behind a "Show Advanced Settings" button. Added a new "IFL Material" button used to mark a material for use in an IFL animation.
* Changed all occurrences of "TSE" to "TGEA" (I guess this name is the one that's going to stick :)
* Fixed triggers not firing when no ground frames were being exported for a given sequence.
* Scaling and rotating the marker empties is now supported.
* Numerous bug fixes, etc.

Many thanks go out to everybody who helped with this release; and special thanks to James Urquhart for writing the exporter in the first place. Contributors and Testers are listed below:

Adam Wilson
Philippe C
Dave Young
Bernard Hugueville
Owyn Murtason
Ziba Scott

And thanks to anyone else who I missed.

Recent Blog Posts

List:	04/10/08 - Blender DTS Exporter 0.96 Released 09/11/07 - Blender Orange Guy Now available 08/10/07 - Blender DTS Exporter 0.95 Released 02/04/07 - Blender DTS Exporter 0.94 Released 12/26/06 - Blender DTS Exporter 0.93 Released 11/25/06 - Blender DTS Exporter version 0.92 released 02/15/06 - Blender Exporter User interface Overview, more to come. 05/21/05 - Plan for Joseph Greenawalt

Submit your own resources!

Tony Richards (Apr 10, 2008 at 02:12 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Awesome! It's great to see continued support for Blender.

If it's ok, I've provided a secondary mirror located here.

Ben Acord (Apr 10, 2008 at 16:08 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Yeah! Me happy.

Daniel Buckmaster (Apr 10, 2008 at 17:03 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Still steaming from the oven... mmhmm...

Rene Damm (Apr 10, 2008 at 19:32 GMT)

Yes, this is great! Can only agree that it is real good to see ongoing support for Blender.

Thank you, Joseph, for the work you put into this!

Scott Wilson (Apr 11, 2008 at 00:51 GMT)

Yes indeed thank you Joseph, currently I've decided to go with blender for my dtses and your work on the exporter is greatly appreciated! Thank you for your time and efforts and plz keep up the good work ;) ! With that said one request for the next version if there will be one; the triangle striping with out the need of vtk with python bindings plz, tryed for days to get vtk compiled with no luck. But by all means I'm not complaining, just consider it a desperate request from a programming noobie =p. Though I have seen the debate in the forums if triangle striping is even worth it *shrug* but once again I'm just a noob when it comes to programming. Again thank you for endless efforts! And for those out there that may not realize he doesn't even get paid to work on this thing! Just does it out of good will to help others as he helps himself!
Edited on Apr 11, 2008 00:59 GMT

Joseph Greenawalt (Apr 11, 2008 at 04:09 GMT)

Thanks Everybody :-)

@Scott:
There is a built-in triangle stripper that's written in Python, but it's not quite as good as the VTK triangle stripper. I also had a really hard time compiling VTK last time I messed with it :-) I'll see about giving the built-in triangle stripper some TLC for the next version. Generally triangle lists are faster though.

Koushik (Apr 11, 2008 at 12:04 GMT)

Yay!!! IFL!!

David Janssens (Apr 11, 2008 at 22:20 GMT)

Thanks for the update!
I get the impression that Torque, being not-open source in the GPL way is ignored largely by the Blender developers. It's a sentiment I also encountered on the last two Blender conferences when I mentioned some not-free software.
On the other hand, the Blender people are still high as a kite now that their second open movie project has come to the final stages. I guess that's more important than looking at download problems. That said, whatever happens in the Blender world shouldn't impact the services around it.
Glad to see you support Blender in such a fine way.

You must be a member and be logged in to either append comments or rate this resource.