[editor] Blender/OpenCS integration (post 1.0)

[Markelius]

This proposal certainly does not match my experience with MW modding. Usually the art people just drop a batch of files on us who work with the CS. There is no intersection between people working with the CS and those who are working with modeling programs.

Perhaps when working in a large group dynamic like TR or one of the Province Projects, but for my own projects, like my landscape overhaul and Stros M'kai, I'm building the assets and landscaping all myself. Some kind of integration or live updating would be hugely beneficial to my workflow, as it would remove some steps in the modeling process.

Of course I know Blender integration solely, leaving out programs like Max, Maya, Zbrush and others wouldn't be a very good idea, I was mostly using Blender as an example in my case.

Greendogo's ideas for integration would be really great actually, things like merging existing objects in-editor, creating new objects based on vanilla ones & opening them in a 3d program, etc. would all be really useful to me as an artist.

For example, if I wanted to make an exterior cave, I could stick a bunch of simple rock meshes together to give it basic shape, then merge them all and rebuild the mesh based on that shape in blender. It would be extremely useful.

I really think that we shouldn't be ignoring the potential of features like these for artists such as myself, having some sort of integration like this would make the modding process for me so much easier and open up a lot of new possibilities which wouldn't have been very practical before.

[Zini]

As mentioned before, I understand that my own experience with modelling doesn't apply to everyone.

As also mentioned before I would very much like to go for the IPC approach described above. But it is still unsure at this if we can pull through with that.

Anyway, even without this feature you should have a far easier time with moving resources in and out of OpenMW content projects. We are planning to revamping the resources management after 1.0 and that will include a few nifty OpenCS features that will simplify this task a lot.

[HeadClot]

Anyway, even without this feature you should have a far easier time with moving resources in and out of OpenMW content projects. We are planning to revamping the resources management after 1.0 and that will include a few nifty OpenCS features that will simplify this task a lot.

What features are we talking about here?

Just me being curious

[Berandas]

For example, if I wanted to make an exterior cave, I could stick a bunch of simple rock meshes together to give it basic shape, then merge them all and rebuild the mesh based on that shape in blender.

This is basically creating prefab from the assets. No need to move something back to the modeling software and then back to the engine editor again. I believe this feature was mentioned in some other topic already.

[Ace (SWE)]

There's always the Verse project, from the old MMO game Love. Though it's been completely rewritten by now, and it supports real-time syncing of 2D and 3D data among other things.

It's on Github too.

[Zini]

@HeadClot: Moving away from the loose file collection. While we will still continue to support this mode, we will strongly encourage the use of archives (bound to content files), that will be managed by OpenCS. No more need to manually dig in the filesystem. Actually, I am having some pretty nifty Ui ideas that will make getting resources in and out of OpenCS a breeze.

[Mistahtokyo]

So now instead of having lots of loose files for every different texture replacer I install I'll have hundreds of separate archives/plugins to load them? It's like my Skyrim nightmares all over again.

[Zini]

Don't see why that would be a problem. The launcher offers a fairly comfortable way of managing plugins.

[Greendogo]

I understand his statement about the texture replacers. I think one of the reasons that texture replacers were so easy to use on Morrowind was because they were loose, meaning you could switch them out and view them individually rather easily.

I don't think he has cause to worry though; if user management of that sort of thing annoys people too much we can always figure out a better way to do it.