WIP Beta released Blender Collada CDAE (&DAE) Plugin

Since we now have cdae specifications and built in Collada support in blender will probably be dropped soon, I thought a dedicated addon to export models to BeamNG could be useful.

The focus of this addon is exporting, but it contains a cdae importer for debugging purposes. I don’t plan to include a dae importer for now.

It’s still in development and will probably take a while until it becomes really useful.
But if you want to test it out and give feedback that would be great! ^^

Source Code: https://github.com/Grille/Blender_BeamNG_CDAE
Downloads: https://github.com/Grille/Blender_BeamNG_CDAE/releases

 

Do you think that cdae will be a useful fileformat for modeling without the base dae files?

But thanks for hinting me to the definition. I always wanted to be able to read the materialnames from a cdae for my shrinker tool. Now I can do it.

 

If you export to dae or cdae doesn’t makes much difference for the modder.
Except that cdae aren’t browsable from BeamNG yet, something the Dev’s hopefully change.
Maybe I also add dae support in the future, generating the text format isn’t hard once I’m able to build the binary one.

What’s more interesting is to have a plugin that is tailored to beamng’s needs and not a generic format.
Being able to generate material.json from blender materials or, to autogenerate the scene tree are some of the possibilities.

 

suzanne after export and import

 

@fillman86 will like it.

see:
https://www.beamng.com/threads/blender-depreciating-dae-cdae-plugin.104657/#post-1848974

 

this is fantastic! well done. I looked at doing this myself, and instantly had a case of the "oh, I have no idea what I'm doing"

 

Thank you very much for this mate, this is awesome work!

 

Thanks, Thankfully I already have some experience serializing/deserializing mesh data, so I knew what mess I was getting into xD

 

finally...

 

I find building the BeamNG scene tree before export quite tiresome, so alternatively it can be now handled over custom properties.


The plugin now also contains a dae exporter making use of BeamNG specific features.
That one is probably more useful than the cdae one until the dev add better support for using cdae directly.

 

nice! I use this blender plugin almost always for exporting to BeamNG.
https://www.beamng.com/threads/beamng-easy-export-for-blender.85294/

 

Any ideas for conventions on how I parse blender materials?

I need some node structure I can expect.

 

I got material importing working and applying it correctly to the mesh but just the material names

 

I have my own Collada importer/exporter for blender 5.0+ I'm gonna release soon, just some minor things to fix before release

 

In what context?

Nice!
Specifically, for BeamNG or general purpose?

 

General Importer/exporter, but wanna include some extra stuff that helps with beamng dae files on top.

 

--- Post updated ---

 

ah, yea thats expected.
I would need to add a materials.json importer and access to beamng's virtual file-system to fully load materials.

i also really need to optimize that importer from what I see in youre video xD

 

NAh i made my own lol that handles all the older versions of cdae and cached.dts files and stuff so it lags for a bit when trying to figure out which is which cause im not the best at coding

When i tried to use your base addon from GitHub it jus wouldn't even show as an addon nor would it when i installed it manually.

 

oh lmao
nice job reverse engineering thes formats witout specs btw ^^
what blender version do you have?, does it at least give a python error?