Expanding Data Asset Pipeline Section to include various Blender workflows.

[csevier]

Starting a discussion here.

Correct me if I am wrong, but, it would seem like most of us use blender as essentially both our content creation and level editors (scene editor if you will). I think it would be beneficial to add sections to the documentation covering the various techniques of how do the major things a panda3d game needs. Not necessarily a how to use blender, but, a how to use blender as a level/asset editor specifically for panda3d. And do this in a way that it relates to individual data/formats and their exporters in the ecosystem.

For example, lets say I want to add collisions nodes. How might one go about adding collision nodes, in blender, then have them exported as eggs and what that will do in engine. etc. Like with the blend2bam. If you want invisible collision geometry, that would require either a specially name collection or special flag on export. Or things like, how does one add a tag that will lead to being queried data in engine. These things arent really front and center but are pretty important because some stuff just simply cant be done as easy in code! Happy to help start this process of collecting wisdom and writing it down. Let me know what you think.

[rdb]

Agreed. Someone just needs to go and write the content. :-)

[csevier]

Cool, I'll work on it.

[izzyboris]

As someone trying to use exactly this workflow, such a section would be immensely useful.

I've been using blend2bam and have been attempting to figure out how to get everything working in that workflow, so I'd love to see documentation on things like:

• Putting collision nodes for static models into a "InvisibleCollisions" collection or use the "--invisible-collisions-collection" argument in blend2bam to specify a matching substring
• Supported versions of Blender (I've had to use 3.3 instead of 3.6 to get animations working, and I think blend2bam doesn't support anything before 2.8)
• (this may be a bug) how you need to do model.find_all_matches("**/+CollisionNode").hide() after loading these because loaded CollisionsNodes are shown by default
• Documenting what types of Blender Rigid Bodies are supported (box, sphere, capsule [also used in place of cylinder]) and that mesh/deform options are not supported so (I think?) they can't relocate with the armature.
• How to access Blender's Custom Properties at various levels of the model hierarchy

I'd be happy to help in the effort and share my experiences in trying to learn all this, though my knowledge of the ecosystem is still very limited.

[csevier]

I think we all know this is what's needed. You and I can prove to have a new perspective since we're learners. I've been diving in head first. I'm hoping through my experiences and help from others I can start to distille a workflow for various things.