Hello, I want to discuss whether or not it is worthit to write an exporter for a custom file format for a video game. I have tried writing my own Exporter for blender, and have had success with creating a mesh without animation support, however, as soon as I got into adding animation support, that really threw a wrench into things. I previously tried to write a file converter that converted collada files to my own custom format, however that resulted in duplicate UV coordinates, which I didn't want.

I'm thinking of giving up on writing an export script for Blender, since it doesn't have enough documentation or tutorials to do so. Looking at the other export scripts that come with blender doesn't seem to help much, and I feel that writing a converter would be more worthit. I might try writing a converter for .x format, but I want to know if anyone else has ever gone through this, and what your thoughts on the matter are.

I want to discuss whether or not it is worthit[sic] to write an exporter for a custom file format for a video game.

It is necessary. Your engine should never load a model file that was not specifically designed for your engine.

I have tried writing my own Exporter for blender

I might try writing a converter for .x format,

You should work with a format that will be as widely used as possible. Making something for Blender is useless for people who use 3DS Max. You should use an interchange format such as COLLADA or FBX; .X files are not interchange formats.
I recommend .FBX as it is the most mature in terms of SDK support and documentation.


L. Spiro

You should work with a format that will be as widely used as possible. Making something for Blender is useless for people who use 3DS Max.

Ah yes, I agree. However this is just a solo project, and I don't have teh monies to afford 3ds Max so i'm stuck using Blender :/

The way this is usually done is that you use some standard export format from the 3D tool to read it into your game. In your engine, you should have some asset conditioning utilities, and this is traditionally where a conversion to a more efficient format takes place. You bake all of the data down to a tightly packed binary file that you know the structure of. This will remove all of the unneccesary information from the file, ensure that you can read the file in the order you initialize things, etc.

You can look into the FBX SDK from Autodesk, I've had some luck with that, or as Nanook suggests, Assimp is a good library that's really not difficult to use.

Yeah, I might just use assimp, that seems to me like a much better alternative from what i've researched.

You should work with a format that will be as widely used as possible. Making something for Blender is useless for people who use 3DS Max.

Ah yes, I agree. However this is just a solo project, and I don't have teh monies to afford 3ds Max so i'm stuck using Blender :/

That wasn’t the point.
Don’t make exporters for a specific piece of software—make exporters for interchange formats such as COLLADA and FBX so that anyone using any software can make model files for your game, from Blender, Maya, whatever.
Put another way, if you make something for Blender, then you support only Blender.
If you make a converter for FBX, then you support Blender, Maya, 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, SoftImage 3D, Alias|Wavefront PowerAnimator, and NewTek LightWave 3D.

I’d recommend FBX over Assimp. While Assimp supports more formats than you would ever need, I believe the way it stores animations is lossy, storing them as keyframes of full-sized matrices rather than as individual tracks.
This might be part of a post-processing feature. Other post-processing features such as collapsing the scene graph are also undesirable if they end up being exported that way—you definitely want to keep the full scenegraph intact when you export to your own format.
I am also not sure how easy it is to do keyframe minimizing, etc., in Assimp.


L. Spiro

While Assimp supports more formats than you would ever need, I believe the way it stores animations is lossy, storing them as keyframes of full-sized matrices rather than as individual tracks.

Each node has separated keys for position, rotation and scaling: http://assimp.sourceforge.net/lib_html/structai_node_anim.html