Updated Blender Addon

The Worldforge Blender Addon has been seen a large update, adding some cool features and fixing some long standing issues. In this post I’ll describe what’s changed.

But first,

What is the Worldforge Blender Addon?

Blender is the designated tool used by the Worldforge project to create 3d assets (“meshes”). It’s a fully featured, professional and totally free 3d creation tool. Since all of our assets are provided as Free Software it’s important that the source material is in a format which allows anyone to access it. Hence we use Blender.

The Worldforge Addon provides an easy way for content creators to export meshes and armatures from Blender into a format which both the Ember client and the Cyphesis server can understand (the OGRE mesh format).

What’s new?

No OGRE addon dependency

We no longer depend on the separate OGRE Blender addon. Previously our addon depended on the OGRE Blender addon also being activated, and delegated the actual export to it. This is no longer the case. It’s now sufficient to solely install the Worldforge Addon.

Easier installation

The addon was previously split into two addons which interacted. Not anymore; now everything is contained in one (large) file. This makes installation for content creators easier.

Exporting scaled meshes and armatures

Previously the addon couldn’t correctly handle export of scaled meshes and armatures (due to how the OGRE addon worked internally). This is now fixed, so any scaled object will be correctly exported.

Combine multiple meshes in export

If multiple meshes are selected they can be exported as one mesh, with many submeshes. The currently active object will be used as center.

Automatic material name generation

When exporting a mesh the addon will now take care of automatically figuring out the correct OGRE material name to use for submeshes. This is done by looking for which diffuse texture is used, and from it’s location in the asset repository deducing the material name.

Automatic skeleton links

Animated meshes will now have the link to the skeleton used automatically deduced.

OGRE material generation

Any missing OGRE Material definition for textures used can now be automatically generated with the push of a button.