Blender instances "patch" for the unofficial exporter

[resmas]

ohhh I made it....finally!!
Thx anyway....its a bit tricky....but I finally got it.

that Y axis was the problem....

THANKS for this amazing tool

cheers

[ROUBAL]

Hello all, first I want to say a Big Thank You to Matej and Roubal for this amazing plugin.

HéHé ! I am for nothing in this great plugin ! I just gave an example file. All effort is from Matej !

[megacal]

This is an separate addon that attaches itself to the unofficial Lionel's Blender exporter GUI.

Is Lionel's exporter different from yoyoz's 1.19? I didn't know there was
another exporter.

I've been using yoyoz's 1.19 with Blender 2.68 & Octane 1.2 no problem.

Is there any advantage to using Lionel's?

[megacal]

Aha! Lionel IS yoyoz!

And 1.19 IS the Unofficial Exporter.
I grok it now.

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=4903

Thanks for the patch.

[matej]

Hey guys!

Sorry for very late reply, was out of the loop for a few months (nice new site )

Regarding of particle animation export, I've been playing with this a few months ago already and can only be done by integrating this script into the 1.19 exporter. This would require quite some work.

Regarding the particle children export, it cant be done, >because last time I checked<, there is no Python API to access to children particles. (I was out of the loop also in regards to Blender development, so maybe this changed, but probably not )

It seems that the integrated solution for Blender is already in beta and available for purchase. You guys using the integrated plugin? Its production ready?

[matej]

Hi. Small update to the script

0.2.0 Update (download at the top of the first post)

* Fixed a bug with hair emitter rotation causing wrong particle local rotations

When a hair emitter object would have non-applied rotation transforms, the particles would have wrong rotations. Now it exports properly even if the emitter is parented to a series of other objects with arbitrary rotations or using constraints.

Cheers

[matej]

Another small update (I'm finding out issues and solving them as I work on some project)

0.2.1 Update (download at the top of the first post)

* Hair particles scaling with 'velocity' is now possible

Previously the settings in the 'velocity' panel didn't work correctly for hair PS (but worked for emitter PS). Now the settings in that panel are fully usable to grow and randomize your particles.

The reason for the inconsistency is that emitter PS exposes global transforms of each particle, but with hair PS you need to calculate some of the values from the underlying strand primitive. Also all the data is relative to the emitter, so you need to account for that too.

Learning by trial & error

[resmas]

Thank you Matej for your work.

cheers
resmas

[kavorka]

I was finally able to export some grass to Octane!

Couple of questions. Is anyone able to actually get random rotation of the grass? all of mine are always the same z rotation.

Also, is it possible to export the total emitter #, right now it seems to take account the display value for the export.

Thanks for all of the hard work!

[matej]

Also, is it possible to export the total emitter #, right now it seems to take account the display value for the export.

Thanks for reporting this. At first glance it seems that it exports all hair particles (if you look the # in Blender and # in Octane scatter node is the same), but what's actually going on is that Blender sets the size of the hair to zero for every "non-visible" hair (if this is a hack or for optimization, I dunno). The hair strand is essentially collapsed into a point and since the correct size has to be determined from the length of the root-to-tip vector, it writes a zero scale transform into the .csv.

This area is still lacking documentation and its even possible that the needed data is not exposed through Python, but only available in C++ (which means I cant do much about it ). I'm more or less discovering things by trial & error. Will investigate further on how to obtain data of "hidden" hair, but for now you should always set visibility to 100% when exporting hair PS.

The visibility slider for emitter PS works correctly though. There's a difference on how emitter PS & hair PS data is exposed through the API, the latter being more hard to work with.

As for rotations, the modes that work are normal and velocity/hair. The randomization params should work. Randomized rotations are also achieved by tweaking settings in the velocity panel. Post a screen of your settings if it sill gives troubles.