Get Better Collada Exporter into Blender upstream

[ghost]

This thread shows many blocking issues that prevent the Blender team from merging BCE. Can't those issues be easily fixed?

Additionally, the last comment says that the Blender team is working on a Python-based Collada importer to replace OpenCollada for 2.8. Maybe the efforts can be joined and/or parts of BCE can be integrated into their new exporter?

I say this because if the Blender community maintained it, it would get a lot of features in a short time.

[StraToN]

AFAIK, @reduz pushed a lot to get his OpenCollada exporter merged into Blender, because the current one is simply broken. Blender devs didn't really seem to accept this, for some reason. I'm not sure I understood the full story though.

[reduz]

If anyone wants to take the work doing the changes the Blender guys requests, feel free to do it

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Julian Murgia notifications@github.com wrote:

AFAIK, @reduz https://github.com/reduz pushed a lot to get his OpenCollada exporter merged into Blender, because the current one is simply broken. Blender devs didn't really seem to accept this, for some reason. I'm not sure I understood the full story though.

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/5457#issuecomment-229007839, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe/AF-Z2_xymOER3rq7N_5uJG3JwOibFJNzks5qQPLKgaJpZM4I_0Zo .

[akien-mga]

Would it make sense to move the better collada exporter to its own git repo, and then organize some work on it with the help from interested Blender devs?

[ghost]

@akien-mga Please do; I think you can point to it from this repo, but in any case it makes more sense as a standalone repo so that we can use issues, PRs and stuff and they don't have to concern themselves about Godot

@reduz I can't promise anything but I'll try

[ghost]

Just for the record - I'm working on this.

Here's the suggested changes (from the Blender review):

• Temporary mesh data created on every export and never removed.
• Path separator written as "/", should be os.sep or use os.path.join(...)
• Unnecessary string concatenation used on potentially very large strings / Replace string concatenation with string formatting, see: https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BA/browse/master/io_scene_x3d/export_x3d.py
• Raw, un-escaped strings written to XML (Using " in object name will break export) / Follow general conventions for writing XML that are used in the X3D exporter, see: https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BA/browse/master/io_scene_x3d/export_x3d.py (how strings are formatted, indentation etc..).
• use slots for all classes, saves memory and dynamically defining new attributes isn't used anywhere here (with added advantage typo's in assignment raise an error).
• Pep8 style. (Done in #5480)

@akien-mga Are you still going to make it a separate repo or maybe do you want to wait for all suggested changes to be implemented?

[akien-mga]

@paper-pauper Sounds great! I'll move the exporter to a separate repo asap.

[akien-mga]

@paper-pauper Done: https://github.com/godotengine/collada-exporter

Could you start opening issues on the new repo for each of the points that you listed?

[ghost]

@akien-mga Sure, I will in a couple of days, and add other issues as well if I get some time to study the code.

[ghost]

Closing this issue, resuming it on the collada-exporter tracker.

[ghost]

The issue has resumed on godotengine/collada-exporter#31, if anyone is interested...