VRML/ X3D export with animations and multitexure support!

In the last months i developed at area42 a feature-rich and fast VRML/ X3D exporter for Bitmanagement’s high performance viewer BS Contact VRML/X3D.
This initial release includes support for real-time shadows, static radiosity lighting, dynamic particle effects, compression,
multi-texturing, normal and environment maps, movie textures, animation and custom interaction scripting from within Blender itself
… and a lot more :slight_smile:

Best of all: Bitmanagement offer this to the Blender community for free including a full documentation!
Bitmanagement believes in the possibilities of Blender and will start a Silver Sponsorship too.

http://www.bitmanagement.de/images/objects/bsexporterblender.png

Check their Site:
http://www.bitmanagement.de/products/bs_exporter_blender.en.html

The exporter can be downloaded from the Download Center:
http://www.bitmanagement.de/download/playerdownload.en.html

The documentation is freely available both in the SDK preview and the private SDK:
http://www.bitmanagement.de/developer/contact/sdk-prev/doc/tools/blenderexporter/index.html

PS: Hoping you have a nice toy for your holidays!

Bart,

Very interesting site with some really nice demos. I’m interested in this sort of application (realtime walkthroughs) so I’ll be playing with your export scripts during the Christmas holidays. This could fill the hole left by the non-development of the IE BlenderPlayer plugin.

Good to hear that a commerical company has recognised the power of Blender and wishes to help support it’s use and development.

Maybe have some questions for you later.


Ricky Dee
http://www.digital-air.co.uk/

Cool

Maybe the 3d community will have a sucessor to the venerable Wavefront .obj format now?

I used to use Vrml all the time but my knowledge of X3D is limited. Is their a free viewer availble? Like the old SGI cosmo player?

thanks in advance

THX!

Bitmanagement has a very cool technology and their viewer BS Contact is the best you can get.

Some times it was hard to find out how all this python stuff could work but I had a lot of fun to do it. And bugs i found during development could be fixed for 2.4 too.

If you found bugs, you should probably put them in the tracker right now :slight_smile:

We probably will do builds tonight or today…

LetterRip

Can this be used to export VRML2 with textures?

THANK U !!!
i really need it :slight_smile:

BART once again YOU ARE THE MAN!!!

This looks GREAT. I cannot use the xml side of it right now until I get a better laptop but just having that availible is such a good thing.

To answer someone question BS Contact VRML/X3d viewer is trialware. That is you can download it for free but when you then try to view and x3d or vrml file you get a floating and flipping logo that goes across your screen. Its petty small and if you BS Contact then it dissappers. The cost for BS Contact is in pretty expensive BUT seeing how this company needs to make money to stay afloat I do not fine that they are charging a lot for the full version that offensive. The registered version is really meant for developers and webmasters that are going to be using the product to host interactive 3d sites/products, to get full funtionality. For the average user the logo is not THAT distrubing.

If you just cannot deal with the logo and cannot afford to get the full version try blaxxun Contact. From what I understand the people at Bitmanagement actually wrote Blaxxun then when the company went thru financial trouble and new ownershitp they started Bitmanagement and wrote thier own product. One warning though. Blaxxun Contact is ONLY a vrml viewer. As far as I know it does not have X3d viewing capability. BUT most of the multiuser vrml worlds on the net were developed with blaxxun’s server product so compatibility there is not a problem. Which is the very reason I have both products on my computer. Blaxxun will display the multiuser world and its chat interface. Bitmanagement will display the vrml.

@LetterRip
Of course i submitted all bugs to the bug tracker :slight_smile:

@2ner
It does! includes copy textures to outputfolder and multitexuring.

@Shaba
You can talk to Bitmanagement getting a Community license for non commercial use.

Hi!

Thanks for this Bart!

I use Cortona 4.2 viewer and there is a beta 5.0 out with x3d. Cortona can be used by windows, macs and even pocket pcs. There is also the Open VRML/x3d viewer for linux, etc. Can this exporter be used for these viewers as well?

Again thanks!

gaiamuse

@gaiamuse
The output of the exporter is optimized for Contact and the X3D standard. Cortona 5 is not an full X3D compatible viewer. May you have to try.

After Blaxxun goes down i often used Cortona too but always with pain and the any other version then the windows cersion did not really run. And overall Cortona is very slow too (see the graphs in this PDF on page 2: http://www.bitmanagement.de/documents/ix.1003.068-071.pdf ).

Now i’m very happy with Contact and the possibilities of X3D and the XML encoding :slight_smile:

Hi

I downloaded the script but I am getting the following error when I try to export. No panel shows up but the error:

Using Python 2.3, windows 2000

File “<string>”, line 33, in?
ImportError: Bad magic number in C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender.blender\scripts\bitmanagement_x3d.pyc

Does this script require having to put the commerical viewer BS Contact on your system? In other words, does it have a particular call out to the BS viewer before it transforms your Blender file into VRML/x3d?

I thought there was going to be development from the other vrml2 and x3d scripts currently in Blender. I can still use other browsers with those, but I was really looking forward to seeing those updated for animations etc and still be able to use a brower that would use standard VRML or X3d scripting without all the proprietary protocols.

For example, when converting Blender’s particle effects into the VRML/X3d format is it still considered using open source protocols or are they BS Contacts own commercial protocols which a person has to license in order to use them?

gaiamuse

Hello Gajamuse,

try to download it again, i taled to Bitmanagement and they put up a new built.

Thx for your feedback!

Hi Bart,

I downloaded the script again and it did export, but cannot read up in Cortona without tweaking a few settings in the vrml file. It did not do the animations either, so I suspect that this script is specific to BS Contact player.

I noticed that there is no GPL license like the earlier scripts and I prefer to work with those even if it means less functionality. I am hesitant to use a commercial script with such a wonderful, fantastic open source software like Blender.

If you have any energy to continue development of the previous VRML97 and X3D scripts as GPL , it would most definitely be appreciated.

gaiamuse

May animations work but you must enable loopig. This script produces X3D compatible output and cortona isn’t an X3D compatibel plugin.

I’m working on an update so any feedback is welcome.

Yes, I know that Cortona is not an X3d plugin. I was testing the VRML component of this script like I said in the previous message.

I would like to see the present VRML and X3d GPL scripts currently bundled with Blender to have animation and multitextured updates, while still keeping these scripts GPL of course. I prefer to work with scripts that are not so specific to any one particular commercial browser but can be read from other browsers. Cortona is but one that I mentioned. There is Flux and Octagon for Windows. Also several open source browers are available, not all of them for Windows though, but will eventually be available sometime in the future.

Oh, by the way, there is an open source VRML/X3d script for Maya.

If the current bundled VRML/X3d scripts were updated, I would love to do more testing!

gaiamuse

Hello,

I posted this proposal on the Blender Script dev mailing list, but i thing it could be interresting to write a post here to.

I have just a little idea… cgkit (http://cgkit.sourceforge.net/) could import VRML to write a renderman
export, so if we use your plugin to covert a blender scene into a VRML
fila and, next, use the cgkit import feature to write a .rib file, i
presume that we could, at last, have a great renderman exporter?

I try it very soon.

Merry Christmas, all!

Dienben

A new Version (1.02) of the “BS Exporter for Blender” is available:

  • better Performance
  • better support for animation
  • improved lightning
  • support for the node PointSet
  • bugfixes

Check their Site:
http://www.bitmanagement.de/products/bs_exporter_blender.en.html

The exporter can be downloaded from the Download Center:
http://www.bitmanagement.de/download/playerdownload.en.html

The documentation is freely available both in the SDK preview and the private SDK:
http://www.bitmanagement.de/developer/contact/sdk-prev/doc/tools/blenderexporter/index.html

Meanwhile Bitmanagement releases BS Contact X3D/VRML 7.0 too:
http://www.bitmanagement.com/developer/contact/relnotes70.html

Take a look at this pictures! Its realtime 3d!
http://www.visites-3d.com/visites-3d/vrml/screenvrml/sibenik/BSCSibenik3.jpg

http://www.visites-3d.com/visites-3d/vrml/screenvrml/dragon/dragon1.jpg

Bart, Did you get my pm about the bug in the viewpoint node of a vrml export. It adds a centerOrRotation field. I do not know if that is an X3d field but I checked with the vrml2.0 spec and its not a valid field in a viewpoint node.

Ok nevermind I see you did get it. I hate that the new forum software here does not notify you with a pop up when you have a pm,like the old software did.