Blender 2.73 gets an updated Collada Importer

[Gaia Clary]

Hi;

 

This is an announcement for creators who need better support for importing rigs from other tools into Blender. Reasons for doing this are:

 

• Create assets for other creator's Characters
• Use Blender's Animation system to create SL animations
• I guess a few more reasons ...

If you don't see a reason for an improved Blender importer, then the following is not for you.

 

I have been asked to look into the Blender Importer to find possible improvements. And we ended up adding some import options to Blender which might be very helpful for some of you. I can imagine that especially character creators who provide Development rigs for attachment makers may be interested in this Blender improvement.

 

The new options will officially become available with Blender 2.73, but you can get them already in the nightly blender builds starting today (2-dec-2014).

 

New Collada importer options:

 

• Leaf bones are now better placed. I believe that the leaf bone orientation is now preserved as given in the Collada file
• But i have also added a "Fix leaf bone orientation" option, which can be helpful when the exporting program is a bit sloppy with its Joint definitions.
• And finally i added a bone chain finder which allows to find "most reasonable chains of bones" which will be automatically connected.

What we have for 2.73 is documented in the Release_Notes/2.73/Import-Export

I would appreciate if creators would contact us (me) for feedback.

 

cheers,

Gaia