I do some OpenGL programming, and use Blender to make the meshes; and I decided that SWF is a good format for storing the textures - they are non-animated, non-interactive, single-frame Flash files, version 4. I wrote my own code in C to load them.
If I want to try these textures out on my models in Blender, I have to convert them to a raster format (and convert again with every tweak I make to the SWF). It would be more convenient if I could load the SWF straight into Blender.
I gather this ought to be possible with Quicktime. However, apple stopped Flash support in Quicktime 7.3, so I’d need an older version. I don’t particularly want to install an old version for my whole computer, so here’s the question: can I put DLLs for quicktime 7.2 (if I can find them) in a local folder (which one?) and have Blender use those to do its importing?
It would probably just be easier to screen capture the SWF and use it in raster format. That way you are using Blender and not just coding some esoteric texture solution.
OK, I should clarify that I wrote the C code to load them into my game, also written in C. This combines meshes from Blender with SWF textures. Screen capturing the SWFs is exactly the method I’ve been using to test out the textures on the meshes in Blender. It isn’t a convenient workflow, and that’s why I asked my question.
I think what I’ll do is write a background application that watches the Flash directory for new SWFs and converts them to bitmaps in the Blender directory. If there was a way to load the SWFs directly into Blender, though, that would be simpler, and it’s frustrating that there nearly is (i.e., old quicktime).