[Flightgear-devel] A few notes from Blender's AC3D exporter plugin programmer: Sir William P. Germano

[Roberto I. <ro...@gm...>]

Hi people,
  I contacted William and asked him to add a simple option to his 
exporter pulgin. He was soon back with an answer and a new customized 
ac3d plugin which accomodates my request.

He was very kind and, after having read a few archived fgfs-dev threads 
about the subject, he asked me to post the following notes. I think 
that's worth a quick reading, since it makes clear a few points.

   Roberto


================
Hi,

I'm Willian, I wrote the ac3d import / export scripts that come with 
Blender. Checking archived posts here related to them, after Roberto 
contacted me, I noticed it might be useful to mention a few things 
possibly not known to all users.

- Configuration:

There's a script called Scripts Config Editor that you can use to tweak 
options for the ac3d importer and exporter. It's in the Scripts window > 
  Scripts menu > System submenu.

As soon as you execute the ac scripts once (no need to finish, you can 
press ESC right after calling them) there will be config data available 
to be edited.

There's another script called Scripts Help Browser in Blender's Help 
menu. From it you can get info about the configurable parameters and 
other notes (it's all written in the scripts themselves, this is just a 
nicer way to read the info).

- Exporting single / double sided face info:

The "Double Sided" button in Blender works per mesh, so if you set or 
unset it all faces in that mesh will be either double or single sided.

I decided not to export that info because there is also a simple way to 
set this *per face*: enter UV Face Select mode (select mesh, press f in 
the 3d view win) and in the Texture Face panel of the mesh editing 
buttons tab (F9 in the buttons win) use the "Twosided" toggle button. To 
copy the face flags to other faces, so you don't have to do it manually: 
select them, then select the face with the data (make it active) and 
press "Copy Draw Mode" in that same panel.

I believe that is the best way (its only drawback is that it's sort of 
hidden inside the uv face select mode), but since Roberto emailed me 
stating he still would like to use the "Double Sided" button, I updated 
the ac3d exporter with an option to define whether to check per mesh or 
per faces (defaults to per face, the current behavior).

I'll test the script properly and commit it to Blender's cvs (btw, the 
next release should be out soon, maybe in a week), but already sent a 
copy to Roberto.

Lastly, in the long run I suppose / hope projects like yours will 
support COLLADA (which we want well represented in Blender, too), but 
I'm really glad to see those two small scripts I started years ago were 
and are still useful to some people involved with such a cool project, 
thanks :) .

PS: I'm not subscribed to this list (thanks Roberto for forwarding 
this), you can reach me at wgermano at ig.com.br

-- 
Willian