Blender: improved Collada importer

[Gaia Clary]

Hi, all;

Some of you might have interest to be able to import Collada files into Blender. With Blender 2.64 the Collada importer has already been improved for static meshes and at least simple builds could be imported with few issues. However when it comes to rigs things are slightly more complicated and Blender didn't do a precious job.

In order to improve this a Collada related gsoc -2012 project (gsoc: Google Summer of Code) has been organized, which was targetted to improve Blender's Animation importer. This project has sucesfully ended and it has now moved into the blender development (for release 2.66). Here are the main improvements:

 

• Skeletons exported by Blender (fo rSecond Life) now nicely reimport with correct bone sizes and correct bone rotations
• Shape keys are now exported/reimported (although they currently get different name on reimport)

If you want to try it then you can get a daily build from graphicall.org or from the blender "download latest builds" page. Ensure that the blender revision is above 53959 ( that should be available on graphicall.org in a couple of hours ) 

You can even help the development by reporting back if something is broken for you (either on the export side or on the import side) or does not behave as you expect. If you want to do so, then just report in this thread. However the prefered way for reporting is to use the blender bug tracker.

cheers,
Gaia

[Ashasekayi Ra]

Thanks for the information, Gaia. ^^