Blender addon

[Eli2]

With the renewed activity around the example suite, i have been looking at the asset pipeline for openmw.
The current version of the niftools blender addon seems incomplete and buggy.
A working export requires an old blender version.

One solution would be to create an OpenMW specific blender addon.
If there is interest and this is seen as a good idea, i would be willing to invest some time.

[psi29a]

The goal is to use the native OSG format instead of NIF, but currently this only works for statics.

So statics with blender->osg type plugin (if one doesn't already exist) is a go.

For animations, we're still stuck with NIF.

From that, I'm not very useful. DestinedToDie has created a very detailed and useful guide for working with Blender and NIFs on windows.

viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3330&hilit=blender

[Eli2]

The basic idea would be to fork the 2.49 nif addon, strip all non mw stuff then port to the latest blender version.

[Zini]

You can try if you want. But that would basically be a race between you doing the addon and OSG support in OpenMW progresses to a point where a NIF addon would become useless. Actually, i have no idea about the time frame for getting full OSG mesh format support. Might be a good idea to get scrawl's input on that.

[Amenophis]

@Eli2 In my opinion, if you do that all the vanilla Morrowind community will praise you for generations to come.
But, yes, although that could speed up the Example Suit with animations, in the long term the greater benefit will come for the vanilla modders.

[psi29a]

I sent Scrawl a message to clarify on this.

From what I've read:
https://www.artoolworks.com/support/lib ... troduction

There is no official support for keyframe or skeletal animation. There is work being done on a nodekit called osgCharacter that provides skeletal animation. Currently there is only a Maya exporter.

^-- having this in blender (and not just Maya) would be fantastic.

Heads up, looks like the last time osgCharacter was touched was somewhere in 2006:
http://trac.openscenegraph.org/projects ... gCharacter

There is also this (also old):
http://osgcal.sourceforge.net/

ReplicantBody was updated last in 2012:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/replicantbody/

I think the new work is being done here:
http://trac.openscenegraph.org/projects ... gAnimation

skeleton animation with rigged mesh [software and hardware implementation]
solid animation
it can link an animation channel of any type to another object, or state attribute. (e.g.: linking the x animation of an object to the alpha of a color.)
blender exporter http://hg.plopbyte.net/osgexport/
timeline scheduler
mixer with priority

[psi29a]

Quick update: Apparently Cedric is working on osgAnimation and that it has been updated at least up to 10 days ago:
https://github.com/openscenegraph/osg/t ... gAnimation

His blender plugin (osg) is here, there is apparently support for animation in it.
https://github.com/cedricpinson/osgexport

To export rigged model from blender you have to name your VertexGroup? with the bone name, because the association is done by name. If you have more than One bone in a vertex group, it will not work. It's something that has to be fixed.

Features
* Export Mesh, Light, Transform
* Export Action (Rigged mesh) and IPOS
* Support Group in blender, and create instance in the blender file
* Export multi uvs, multi texture, multi materials

Todo
* Reduce the multi vertex bone information exported in RigGeometry? (a new bug)
* Share texture in stateset
* Update gui

Releases: 0.14.2 for Blender 2.7 and 0.14.1 for Blender 2.49
https://github.com/cedricpinson/osgexport/releases

So..... in theory in 0.14.1, there might be a way to go from NIF->OSG

[scrawl]

There is some work ongoing to add serialization support to our OSG extensions and animation system, which is the basic groundwork we need to do before we can build a Blender -> OpenMW-OSG exporter with animation support. Check the comments on https://github.com/OpenMW/openmw/pull/844 for some gory details. A native animation pipeline is a really complicated task and depends on other features that are nowhere near completed yet. There is no way to give a time frame on it.

I would advise against using osgAnimation because it is really slow and generally a mess to work with. The main reason I didn't use it was that it doesn't support per-mesh bind matrices as used in NIF files. This rules out converting NIF files to osgAnimation files.

If you did decide to use osgAnimation, you would still need to adjust the engine code to actually recognize and play these animations.

[psi29a]

Oh wow, OK.

So this is exclusive to OpenMW? Would it ever find its way upstream to OSG?

I particularly like this comment here:
https://github.com/OpenMW/openmw/pull/8 ... -164230282

[johndh]

When I chatted with neomonkeus on #niftools the other day, he told me that the Blender plugin is basically abandoned, and there were currently no plans to pick it back up. He'd be the person to talk to.

@Eli2 In my opinion, if you do that all the vanilla Morrowind community will praise you for generations to come.

But soon there will be no reason to use the vanilla engine anymore, especially if you can use Blender for only OMW.