Installing Chicken Exporter for Blender to Panda 3D

Coding Python Support
1

Hello,

I’m trying to installl the Chicken Exporter blender plugin, which allows to export in a format readable by the Panda3D engine. Unfortunately I’m having troubles.

I downloaded the files and copied them to ~/.blender/scripts (I’m under Linux) so that they are located as:


[fabio@gamma ~]$  ls .blender/scripts/
addons  bpydata  bpymodules  chicken_exportR91.py  chicken_install.txt

Unfortunately, even if this seems like the correct procedure to me, Blender seems to completely ignore the plugin. A correct installation would generate a new menu entry in the File->Export menu (at least, this is what I would expect reading the documentation).

Any idea what I’m doing wrong?
Can somebody try installing this script and let me know if it worked?

Thanks a lot,

Fabio Varesano

2

Sorry, that was my fist message and couldn’t post links.
Chicken Exporter: http://chicken-export.sourceforge.net/
Panda3D: http://www.panda3d.org/

3

check the errors!

A plugin will not be activated if there are ERRORs when its loaded (executed).
You can view such errors when starting blender out of the terminal
or you have to run the script out of the blender-text-editor (you need to load it there …)
and you get the blender-error message about not be able to execute it without errors.
But there you need the run from terminal too if you want to see more error-messages about the failing code-lines … etc.

4

No errors shown on the terminal when launching blender. No idea on how would I need to use the blender text-editor to launch that plugin: I don’t think this is the way to use the plugin.

5

This may be the single greatest named exporter in the history of exporters!

That said, the reason it isn’t showing up in Blender isn’t because you installed it wrong, but rather because it was written for Blender 2.45 and newer Blenders cannot recognize it.

If you change the beginning of chicken_exportR91.py from:


#!BPY
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

""" Registration info for Blender menus:
Name: 'Chicken R91 (.egg)...'
Blender: 245
Group: 'Export'
Tip: 'Export to the Panda3D Egg format.'
"""
__author__ = "Daniel Amthauer, Simon Groenewolt, Tom SF Haines, Emanuele Bertoldi, Reinier de Blois"
__url__ = ("Chicken homepage, http://chicken-export.sf.net")
__email__="thaines:gmail*com"
__version__ = "R91"

__bpydoc__ = """
Chicken is an Egg exporter for Blender.<br>
For more information see the included HTML documentation, accessible through the
help button in the script's window.
"""

to:


#!BPY
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
bl_info = {
  "name": "Chicken R91 (.egg)...",
  "description": "Export to the Panda3D Egg format", 
  "author": "Daniel Amthauer, Simon Groenewolt, Tom SF Haines, Emanuele Bertoldi, Reinier de Blois",
  "version": (1, 0, 0),
  "blender": (2, 5, 8),
  "api": 36339,
  "location": "File > Export > Egg (.egg)",
  "warning": '',
  "wiki_url": "Chicken Homepage, http://chicken-export.sf.net",
  "tracker_url": "",
  "category": "Import-Export"}

Then it will show up in a newer Blender’s Import/Export… however, you won’t be able to enable it do to some other outdated errors in the script, which will now show up in the console when you attempt to run Blender. So those would have to be fixed.

Don’t have the time to look at it at the moment, but just wanted to post this to help point you in the right direction

6

Awesome! At least I know what’s happening here… I’ll try getting in touch with the authors to check if they have a newer version… otherwise I’ll evaluate fixing this myself… Don’t know much about blender plugins tough…

Thanks!