OTOY Forums

Hello Lionel,

I have made a topic about a bug here : http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... =32&t=7187, but no one seams to have a clue.

For animation in Blender, it's handy - if not necessary - to have the main scene and the rigged characters in separated .blend files.

I don't know if you're familiar with this procedure, but it's done buy all character animators, I explain it briefly :
you place your environnement and set your camera in a main .blend, lets call it "main_set.blend"
From there you wanna call rigs and props, wich are stored in other blend files aside.
Lets say you have a complex rigged character : you group all of it (bones, armature, geometry) and call this group 'myrig'. you save this file in "my_character.blend".
Back to the master blend file (main_set.blend), you do file > link -> path to.../mycharacter.blend ->group-> 'myrig'.

The linked group is now available in main_set.blend via the command shift + A / group instance.

Currently, your exporter is lost and crashes if you have links / groups in it.

I have reproduced this bug context in the zipped files attached, If you'd have a moment to figure this out, it would be awesome.

The attached files contains the master scene (the default cube), and a .blend wich contains the rig to import as a linked group.
Exporter crashes, leaving an unfinished .obj , and blender's console says : "Runtime Error : Object does not have geometry data".

I'm at your service if you want help on testing stuffs about that.

Yes, I confirm this bug report and also the wish to have this patched in the future. For bigger projects or projects where multiple people work on it, is indeed usual and handy to have your objects in multiple files and then linked into a "master scene" blend.

If I try exporting a scene with linked groups I get this crash:

Kiwi,

I think I can arrange that, I just need some time to look at new obj export code from Campbell to see what he has modified.


Matej,

sounds that's another problem. Can you share you blend file (link to PM if you don't want to make it public).

Cheers,
Lionel

Here's an example scene. In the Sphere.blend there is a sphere which is in a group called "Spheres". The Scene.blend is the master file. From the master file you link the sphere object (File -> Link -> Object -> Sphere) and then you export and everything works. But if you link the group the sphere belongs to (File -> Link -> Group -> Spheres), then it crashes on export with the above posted message.

Try to export the scene as is, it will result in error. If you disable the second layer (with the linked group) and enable the first (where the linked object is), it will export ok. (EDIT: actually I made an error when saving, they are both on the second layer, one on top of the other)

I should first have asked you the following: does the built-in obj exporter work well?
If yes, I may be able to fix together with issue Kiwi has.

I'll anyway have a look.

NOTE: I'm using Blender 2.60 now, and apart from cosmetic error messages and some memory leaks it works as before. I'll also need to get in touch with Campbell for these.

The built in .obj exporter work fine and says this when exporting that scene:
EDIT: Testing this with Blender 2.60 behaves exactly the same

Yes, I also could try your (Kiwi) scene with builtin obj and it worked fine for me too. I was wondering about Matej's scene because it shows up different error but I don't get any error with the exporter and his scene now (I'm testing with Blender 2.60 build 41346).

Hm, I still get the error with 2.6

There are two spheres in my Scene, th one that doesn't export is the linked group -> it's attached to an empty.

when I open your scene in blender I only have one sphere... may be I should first figure out where is the missing one

The I probably messed up when saving

Here is the whole thing, it should have all the necessary. And the second file is the PS test we talked about on PM