Blender 2.63a Collada improvements

[Gaia Clary]

Hi.

Blender 2.63a is out and it comes with some small enhancements which may be interesting for mesh makers:

 

1. Material names are now again compliant to what the SL Importer wants to see. So you no longer need to tweek the dae files by hand to get your LOD meshes compatible. Thanks to Drongle McMahon who mentioned this problem last week. This was not tested in depth, but it should work properly.
2. Collada export now exports the most recent edits when you start it out of Edit mode. Again thanks to Drongle McMahon for the hint.
3. Collada exports for simple static meshes can now be reimported to Blender with less issues. its not perfect yet, but it works much more as expected than before.

Upcoming enhancements for Blender 2.64:

 

1. An optional switch for "Apply Modifiers" will be provided. (Brave hearted mesh builders can get this feature already from graphicAll.org ( i think its named Blender 2.63.5 )
2. Export and Import from loose edges (not important for Second Life)
3. The export/reimport of Collada files from Blender / to Blender will get further improvements (work in progress)

 

If you have any issues regarding Collada, then the very best you can do is to file bug reports to Blender.org, add example files and descriptions how to reproduce the issues. You can be sure that your issue will be answered and if ever possible they will be fixed on a short term basis like drongle's reports from last week :)

But please take care to only report a bug when you are confident that it is a bug and not a "user error". If in doubt, maybe you can add a comment here, so we can check beforehand if its a bug or not.

Have Fun

Gaia

[Luc Starsider]

I tested the 'Apply modifiers' feature in a build from svn the other day, and I'm happy to report it seems to work very well already! I'm VERY happy to see this back in Blender! Thank you so much, Gaia!

- Luc -

[Kennylex Luckless]

Now I feel a bit stupid or lazy, but I did not find a 2.64 build at graphicAll.org. 

[Gaia Clary]

Sorry for the bad wording. What i meant was: You can find builds on GraphicAll which include features that have been implemented AFTER Blender 2.63a was released and BEFORE Blender 2.64 will be available. (I updated the original post to make this more clear)

GraphicAll typically provides Blender versions which are about one day older than the active development. But be aware that these releases are development releases and thus they may be pretty unstable occasionally.

[Masami Kuramoto]

You can also download daily "official" SVN builds from http://builder.blender.org/download/.