landon 0.1.1

A collection of tools, data structures and methods for exporting Blender data (such as meshes and armatures) and preparing it for your rendering pipeline.
Documentation

Landon Build Status docs

A collection of tools, data structures and methods for exporting Blender data (such as meshes and armatures) and preparing it for your rendering pipeline.

The Landon Book

Initial Background / Motivation

Before this module I would export blender mesh / armature data to COLLADA using blender's collada exporter, and then parse that COLLADA into JSON.

This worked mostly well - but here and there I'd run into a model that didn't export quite right and I'd have to dig around to figure out why.

After a year or two of this occasionally happening.. I finally decided to invest some time in writing something myself, knowing that I'd still run into issues here and there, but they'd be issues that I'd know how to address.

The goal of landon is to be a minimal suite of heavily tested, well documented tooling for getting data out of Blender and a set of functions for pre-processing that data so that you can make use of it in your rendering pipeline.

From the beginning landon will be targeted towards my needs for my game Akigi, but please feel very free to open issues / PRs with questions / thoughts / functionality that you think might fit into landon.

The goal is that getting data out of Blender and into your rendering pipeline becomes easy as pie.

Getting Started

landon is in need of more documentation and hand holding around how to integrate it into your pipeline.

For example, all of the tooling uses Rust right now, so if you want to run any of the existing pre-processing functions such as triangulating your mesh you need Rust installed.

So we need a binary with a CLI that you can use to interface with the API without needing Rust. As well as examples of integrating the tooling into your non-Rust application via foreign function interface... WebAssembly... etc.

But for now.. Take a look at the mesh-visualizer directory to see a full working example of implementing skeletal animation with models that were exported using landon.

Running the mesh visualizer locally

git clone https://github.com/chinedufn/landon
npm start

Your web browser should open up with an application that allows you to visualize all of the model's in our test suite.

Mesh visualizer demo site

Contributing

Please open issues explaining your intended use case and let's see if we should or shouldn't make landon support it.

Also feel free to open issues with any questions / thoughts that you have!

To Install

cargo install -f landon

# Install blender mesh json exporter
landon blender install mesh-to-json

# Install blender armature json addon
landon blender install armature-to-json

API

landon

CLI Usage

# Help on all of the subcommands
landon -h

# Exporting data
landon blender export -h

To test

cargo test --all

TODO

  • Integration test where we triangulate a UV sphere that was exported from Blender. Even after running triangulation in Blender our BlenderMesh's triangulate function is saying that there are more than 4 faces so need to see why.

  • BlenderMesh's triangulate function can deal with ngons. Right now only handles 3 or 4 faces

See Also

License

MIT