Blender 3D
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| Content Creation Tools | |
 Index | |
| Autodesk 3ds Max | Autodesk Maya |
| Autodesk MotionBuilder | Softimage XSI |
| Carrara | DAZ Studio |
| Milkshape 3D | Blender 3D |
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| Cheetah 3D | Houdini Escape |
| Wings 3D | DeleD |
| Poser Pro | modo |
| LightWave 3D | Ultimate Unwrap 3D |
| See also Collada Plugins | |
| Blender 3D | |
 | |
| Website: | Blender 3D |
|---|---|
| Collada Plugin: | Illusoft |
| Collada Plugin: | Exports to FBX |
| Animation: | Yes |
| Current Version: | 2.5.2 |
| Price: | FREE |
Illusoft are developing the Collada plugin for Blender which has recently added animation support however bone animations, skinning and armatures are not yet supported. Transform animations (linear, bezier, constant) are supported and import correctly into C4.
The best way to export skeletal animations from Blender is to use the new FBX exporter, which can be found here. This exporter is still being worked on and once finished will be included natively with Blender, as of version 2.5. In its current state it works flawlessly and can be used to export skinned, animated objects from Blender into C4.
The current revision of the plugin is 11892.
Once you have downloaded and installed the script, these are the basic steps you'll need to perform.
- Select all objects to be exported within the Blender scene (usually the armature and mesh).
- Make sure that you have a material assigned to your mesh, even a simple diffuse color will do. If you don't do this, your mesh won't receive any lighting inside of C4.
- Select File -> Export -> Autodesk FBX (.fbx) and a dialog similar to the following picture will appear.
- You can adjust the rotation if need be, for all other settings the defaults seem to work well. Leave the scale at 1, never adjust this value. Don't forget that you can also rotate objects within C4.
- Once exported, use the Autodesk FBX Converter to convert the file from FBX to Collada.
- One Blender unit is equal to one meter in C4. If you need to adjust the scale you can always open the Collada file with any text based editor and at around line 9 alter this line <unit meter="1"/> to whatever you need (typically 0.1).
- Import into C4 in the usual manner. (see Creating an Entity Model)
- The Blender diffuse color material property may be incorrectly assigned as an emission color within C4. Please use C4's material manager to make any necessary adjustments if need be.
Feel free to download the following archive which contains a sample .blend file, consisting of a skinned, animated object, as well as the script for the Blender FBX exporter and pre-exported FBX and Collada files.
A tutorial that deals with exporting from Blender can be viewed here: Importing a mesh with multiple textures from Blender
