[Lindsayts]

wacampbell, on 13 February 2012 - 05:57 PM, said:

I wrote my own export tool so I could experiment with custom features for OR. The exporter has become fairly complete with support for LOD's, animation, etc. It generates a .s file that is usually readable by MSTS as well as OR. The exporter runs in Blender 2.61 currently. There isn't much documentation ( read that as 'no documentation' ) but I'd be willing to share it - especially to someone who was willing to do up some tutorials.

What sort of Documentation are you looking for and IF you distribute the exporter what will be the licence used. Blender is released under the GPL Version 2 and there is a good possiblity one cannot restrict the distribution of an exporter script. The GPL actual forbids restricting ditribution of derived works, the question needing to be answered is is a python export script a derived work, it being very likely an exporter script is a derived work.
If all this can be sorted out I do not mind having a crack at some documentation.
I am not trying to make life difficult here just trying to make things clear. Below is the first paragragh of the GPL version 2. The full text is widely availible.



GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains
a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below,
refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program"
means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law:
that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it,
either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another
language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in
the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".



Lindsay

[wacampbell]

Lindsayts, on 15 February 2012 - 01:06 PM, said:

Blender is released under the GPL Version 2 and there is a good possiblity one cannot restrict the distribution of an exporter script.

Blender doesn't require export scripts to be open source. The Blender to Railworks export script for example is not. And there are other addon's that are commercial and fully proprietary.

I am not sure how I would go.

Blender 2.62 is about to come out and has some changes that breaks many scripts ( including mine ). So I'll hold off release until after I get the fixes in place for 2.62.

But to whet your appetite - it does handle 100K+ poly models with no problem even making many of them loadable into MSTS ( it does matrix collapsing and subobject splitting to keep within MSTS's capabilities ).

And it handles all the Blender modifier stack so you can, for example, add a subsurf to smooth things out, or an edgesplit modifier to sharpen up marked edges. It handles array modifiers. And it handles cloned objects. So finally we only need to make one copy of a wheel and when we modify or change it, all the other wheels update automatically. It even handles particle systems which is how I was placing grass on the terrain in some of my earlier posts.

The materials handling is still a work in progress. Currently it supports all the most used MSTS shaders, as well as alpha transparency, clipped transparency, single sided and double sided objects. But there are some things missing such as alpha sorted transparency, specularity and environment mapping.

[wacampbell]

Further experiments. I've used smaller polygons - encompassing just a small group of 8 or 10 leaves and increased the poly budget to about 18,000 here. The leaves could be a little denser but overall the tree is a little more airy. And there is absolutely no evidence of flat polygons at any viewing angle or distance. Once again the model was fully machine generated and Blender can make many copies with random variations to create variety. Unfortunately with this tree we are in the realm of OpenRails only - it won't load into MSTS for some reason.

[captain_bazza]

Great advance for Open Rails, Wayne. Thank you.

Cheers Bazza

[thegrindre]

I had a similar experience when making my 3D grass and poppy flowers last year. I wrote a thingy on it. It's in our Wiki.
Poly count is far too high for MSTS but my tutorial explains how to get it into OR.

:naughty: