stop reading this forum and finish that lightflow script! Just kidding…but…is it done yet??
I’m still working on it, the thing is that the final details are turning out to be rather problematic, nothing to do with the export itself really, although that might change for other reasons.
Being very pessimistic, I think I probably need another month or so. Sorry for the very long wait, but why don’t you try out any of the other exporters in the mean time, you might not think about LF again. Certain parts of the PovAnim script are quite similar to my script in fact, I hope JM doesn’t think I’m stealing his idea’s…
I mentioned doing studies on lighting a while ago…Well, they’re not done yet. They got interrupted when I left for Villanova at the end of June, and now I have no access to Blender, which crashes the computers here. I will try to continue them at the end of July, when I get back home.
In the meantime, if anyone knows the technical specifications about lights in Blender and Lightflow (especially what exactly the Sphere button does), please post them here. That will make my work much easier and much quicker.
eh, you’ll never break my lightflow habit…but a really good exporter is necessary at some point. It’s tough use 90% of my time on the text file, eh? Not that the existing script isn’t good, but it does have its limitations. I’m also looking forward to doing this year’s entry for the FIRST animation comp with blender/lightflow (I’m going to get by the rule on using MAX for your animation by exporting some spheres or planes from max into blender… maybe do some post-processing in it.) Anyway, a real animation done in blender/LF would look really nice… Might even get the technical excellence award, or better… Right, so, one feature request I have, would it be possible to export regular non-UV mapping to LF? Maybe convert it over to UV and then export it? I’m talking about the standard maps; cube, sphere, tube. This would be a good time-saver. Anyway, thanks for putting in all this time man, it is very appreciated.
Like all other exporters, material texture export is not possible, it simply cannot be done with the current python API. If I knew how to do that, I would have implemented it long ago. I can think of a way to do it though, but that would be rather involved, besides with regards to the latest news, it might be a lot easier in the future…
I’m pretty sure you can do planar, spherical, etc. UV mapping. Thus, it is possible to do the regular texturing methods with UV. As for global, reflection, and other types of maps, I don’t know what to do with those.
Blender will be open source so you could modify it to do those things (if you had the time and the knowledge, of course!)
Eeshlo, I’d love to take a look at the new script in its alpha version - I’m pretty proficient with Python now (I’ll stop with the alliteration). I also got Blender to work on some of the computers.
Of course Lightflow does support all of these, but I can’t access the data in Blender using the current API. All current exportscripts have that problem.
Wait…I was not very clear on that one.
I am not feeling very articulate today, so I’ll do this in steps, like a mathematical proof.
- Lightflow clearly supports UV mapping.
- I said that
I’m pretty sure you can do planar, spherical, etc. UV mapping. Thus, it is possible to do the regular texturing methods with UV. As for global, reflection, and other types of maps, I don’t know what to do with those.
- It sounded like I meant Lightflow could do those types of mapping.
- I meant that Blender could do Cube, Flat, Spherical, and Cylindrical UV mapping with the UV map tool.
- So, you could convert your non-UV mapped image textures to UV mapped ones very easily.
The regular texutres are still inaccessible; I was talking about images. I hope this clears things up a bit.
that doesn’t change the problem. You cannot access the mapping in Blender (that is, you cannot know if it is cubic mapping, planar mapping, …)
Martin
That would not really be necessary, since it is encoded in the uv-coordinates…
But full access to the real materials would be a much better and user-friendly way, as well as having much more control with layering textures and so on. Lightflow has similar pattern mix modes to Blender: blend, multiply, add, sub.
Oh, great. I get worse and worse. The conversions to cube, sphere, etc. mapping would have to be done manually, but I was trying to address Skates’ original question of saving time. He goes to the same school as I do, so I pretty much know what he can and cannot do. Unless he quickly learned the capabilities of the UV mapper in Blender, he would redo the mapping in Lightflow. Manually doing UV in Blender is quite a bit faster than trying to get it right in a Lightflow script.
I hope I haven’t caused too much confusion with this improper display of knowledge.
yeah, I know about most of the mapping capabilites of UV, but I was only suggesting this as a time-saver- it’s really not a big deal. If you saw that screwdriver pic I did a while ago, all of the texturing on the plastic part was done from one image, so at least I can handle a bit of UV work. I was only thinking of doing the regular material-mapping settings because it would be much faster than going into the whole UV mapping process.