Blender in the wilderness

I have been using Panda3d but got curious about jME3. The problem is that Blender 2.5 is tracking down the Collada route (which suits Panda), and there seems to be no support (as yet) for OgreXML. I see from the forums here that there are 2 (now dead) projects, 1 to read Collada data into jME3, and the other to read direct from Blender data (which seems to have a new dump of code by the way). Given that both Collada and OgreXML are dtd based xml (I think that is right) I am wondering if anyone knows of a conversion program. Failing that, does anyone know how to get hold of the OgreXML dtd (and explanation)… I have been searching for it and cannot find it… I don’t even know that it is public. Failing that, does anyone know of freeware that will read in either Blender or Collada data and export OgreXML.

Blender 2.5 is still in beta, I guess thats why there is no exporter for OgreXML yet. As soon as 2.5 stable (2.6?) is out more people will demand it.

I think converting between ogre and collada is not a good idea, with all the differences between 3d modellers and exports to various formats the output will be unexpected I guess.

The abandoned blender importer project is a very interesting on as it removes the conversion layer between blender and jme. If you already think about creating a converter, why not improve this converter. You can check its current state simply by installing the importer in jMonkeyPlatform via Tools->Plugins and converting a blend file you drop in a new projects asset folder.

Cheers,

Normen



Edit: The importer source is available at http://jmonkeyplatform-contributions.googlecode.com

Thanks Norman. I see you are the guy who has been developing this. I also see from the svn that someone (pgi) has uploaded a bunch of code about 30 hours ago. The code seems to be handling animation, materials, etc. Presumeably that code will be checked and incorporated (in some way) if it checks out, or is this trail dead as far as JMonkey is concerned?

I have not been developing this, I am the creator of jMP and jme3 jbullet physics. Pgi started all those projects but he will not continue them. As I said, we find the importer very interesting but it has been abandoned just recently (a day ago) and so nobody really had the time to take over the project just yet. All content in the contributions repo is not part of jME or jMP yet, its… user contributions :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Normen