Attempting a Blender to DXF or SVG animation exporter plugin for Blender 2.6

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11-23-2013, 10:37
dream

Attempting a Blender to DXF or SVG animation exporter plugin for Blender 2.6

Check later posts by TL for working plugin...
11-29-2013, 11:52
drlava

Have you seen this thread form 2009?

http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...hlight=blender
12-01-2013, 19:08
telmnstr

Kudos for your work dream! I tried doing dxf export from Sketchup a few months ago, but it didn't go so well.

Free sketchup can't export a view, only the object to dxf I think I used. Fair enough.

Ildasos is able to convert it (make sure optimization is off) to ilda object or ilda frame, and laserboy could rotate it but I think I had issues with zoom or something. But you just end up with too many faces on objects once projected. It might be possible to use them with a clipping plane to cut off the back half, but still there was enough optimization that would need to be done on what I had it would be easier to trace it from an image.

Blender export with means to get to ilda could possibly be a way to get results like the killer Pangolin plugin for 3dsmax. That would be killer!
12-02-2013, 07:08
TL

I've an dxf exporter based on the svgwriter ready for months, but was just too lazy for a nice GUI around it.
ILD SOS even supports color gradients on lines and the "sample raster" should also work with svg files.

I think I could add a GUI around this the next days/weeks, so it's easier to use. Currently I'm editing my export script for the various options
the vector renderer from Blenders provides.

Thomas

Quote:

Originally Posted by dream

Thanks.

Haven't gotten much progress with this to be honest.
This is as far as I can get by using the default DXF exporter of Blender.
I am able to access the vertices and their colors, material color and particle positions to write that data to a DXF file myself, but the format is a bit confusing for me.

I am more interested in the SVG renderer right now. http://www.geocities.jp/blenderyard/...26/README.html
I was able to modify it to fix some bugs and support material colors, still trying to add vertex color support. I'll post that when I'll do more tests.

If I could get the "Sample Raster" feature of ILD SOS to work with SVG, now that would be killer. We could use the SVG exporter as-is and get proper colors and shading.
I've asked about this in the ILD SOS thread.
12-02-2013, 13:17
TL

Color gradients are simply a colorfade from one to another color.

I've just tested the sample raster function with svg files and it really doesn't work...

Currently the script is really messy, it was done in a few minutes based on my previous work with blender and dxf files.
Give me some time to clean this a little up... ;-)

Out of interest, what bugs did you encounter in the original svg script?
12-04-2013, 13:08
TL

3 Attachment(s)

Quote:

It's also pity that this renderer ignores points and lines that aren't part of a polygon. I wanted to create some line abstracts but ended up with nothing. I've thought of a workaround but it doesn't work for all shapes, only works with orthogonal camera and produces dublicate vertices.

This can't be possible, since the rendere can only transform objects with surfaces to lines...
Regarding freestyle scripting, it's virtually nowhere documented... This is also my problem regarding the GUI options for the dxfWriter...

so here is the dxfWriter for Blender.
Download
Just copy it to the Blender/scripts/freestyle/style_modules/ directory and assign it as style module in Blender.

It respects the percentage scale for rendering and does proper frustum culling. Currently it doesn't support RGB colors,
instead it maps the rendered colors to the standard dxf palette. But I think this isn't a big problem, since ILD SOS can overlay
the colors from the rendered images...
Currently no GUI is provided for the writer for controlling which edge types are exported. But I'm working on this.

I'm currently using the dxfWriter in one Layer and other Layers for the various freestyle rendering options.
All I have to do is rendering twice, one pass for writing the dxf files and one pass for the bitmap files.
Afterwards both are combined with ILD SOS. To help ILD SOS use a relative thick line in freestyle for rendering.

Here's a small example including shading (not testet on a real preojector, but should display ok).
Only Blender and ILD SOS were used...

Objects inside Blender:
Attachment 41113

ILD SOS:
Attachment 41114
12-04-2013, 13:14
colouredmirrorball

Nice work both! Looking forward to what comes off this...
12-05-2013, 06:21
TL

Quote:

Originally Posted by dream

Great job TL!
I can think of a workaround, might work:
Adding another pass to iterate through all curves and meshes in the scene looking for lines and points and adding them manually to the DXF data.
What do you think?

There are few problems in my opinion:
1) as this had to be done in pythons, it would be very slow
2) we would have to uses the same 3d to 2d algorithm as blender internal and decide afterward which points/lines are visible due to objects behind other objects etc.

maybe there is another solution for this...

Quote:

Originally Posted by dream

I think it's okay like this myself.
But I can think of one reason when you'll want to add proper color exporting: for people not using ILD SOS.
So maybe we should consider this.

It does use a approximated color at the moment, it can be changed easily, it's only a question of time...

Quote:

Originally Posted by dream

Anyway, when I get my PC running I'll test this out with some complex animations and post the results.
Good job again.

I'm really curious about your results...

Quote:

Originally Posted by dream

BTW, can we host the exporter on googlecode , sourceforge or blender.org one day? I hate when I can't find the download of a tool after few years...

I will put it on my web page...

Thomas
12-05-2013, 10:39
swamidog

that's my video ;)

let me know if you want the show file for it.. as a little thank you for the awesome work you guys are doing on the dxf plugin.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dream

Reading vertex position, normal, color, material data, bone weight, bone name/index and exporting to file takes few seconds for a complex 3000+ vertex scenes for me. Only read colors and materials and considering your scenes will be simpler than that because of modern scanner speed and I think it won't be *very* slow, but definitely will add a lot of delay for each frame, yeah.
I'd suggest to make it optional (check button?).

I see what you mean. I wasn't even thinking about rendering lines and points *and* polygons at the same time. Only thinking about rendering lines for abstract animations like people make with LSX now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDh5H...cgswgPUMk2ilKw
Maybe add point and line support as optional and experimental feature for stuff like this.

As for another solution, Cython or C Python modules might be an option but will be platform dependant, unless we make a module for Win, Mac and Linux. Can't think of anything better, sorry.

I just got my PC charger fixed, will work on it now.
12-05-2013, 21:12
drlava

Nice work. In the ilda file posted in 11 above, it appears that the corner sensitivity is a little too high, or some other little bug, as occasionally a non-corner edge is drawn inside the wheel and on its side. Other than that, it's good progress and with the faster render times I look forward to trying this again sometime.

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