Art export issues and other thoughts on it.

[Aiwendil]

In here I will put issues I faced and ideas I had while trying to get the blender files exported for TitA. Comments are welcomed as always.


Mesh factories
The meshes used in CS and because of that also in the PS engine are created by factories. Each factory needs to have a unique name. As far as I see the names are defined by the object name of Blender (or the name of the mesh...not really sure). The problem here is that without renaming the objects in blender you can very easily end up with two maps having the same name for a object (especially if just using the standard names generated by blender). This also means that the names you give the objects in blender shouldn't be too generic. So...naming every objects in blender is not an option it is a must!


Lovelace map and not really a problem...but also not really "beautiful":

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factories/commercial_02
factories/commercial_03
factories/commercial_04
factories/commercial_05
factories/commercial_06
factories/commercial_07
factories/commercial_08
factories/commerical_01
factories/mansion_1
factories/mansion_2
Also lovelace map but in my view not acceptable because too generic:

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factories/terrain
factories/terrain.002
Pedestal Map and completely unacceptable:

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factories/curveMesh.034
factories/curveMesh.036
factories/curveMesh.038
factories/curveMesh.040
factories/curveMesh.042
factories/curveMesh.044
factories/curveMesh.046
factories/curveMesh.048
factories/curveMesh.050
factories/curveMesh.052
factories/curveMesh.054
factories/curveMesh.056
factories/curveMesh.058
factories/curveMesh.060
factories/curveMesh.062
factories/curveMesh.064
factories/curveMesh.066
factories/genCircle
factories/genCircle.001
factories/genCircle.003
factories/genCircle.004
factories/genCircle.014
factories/genCircle.015
factories/genCircle.016
factories/genCircle.017
factories/genCircle.018
factories/genCircle.019
factories/genCircle.021
factories/genCircle.027
factories/genCircle.029
factories/genCircle.042
factories/genCube
factories/genCube.001
factories/genCube.002
factories/genCube.003
factories/genCube.003Cube.001
factories/genCube.005
factories/genCube.010
factories/genCube.014
factories/genCube.018
factories/genCube.103
factories/genMesh
factories/genMesh.001
factories/genPath2
factories/genPath2.003
factories/genPath2.005
factories/genPlane.001
factories/genPlane.002
factories/genPlane.003
factories/genPlane.004
factories/genPlane.005
factories/genPlane.006
factories/genPlane.007
factories/genPlane.010
factories/genPlane.011
Not sure which map but also a bit generic:

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factories/ground_plane
In the end I think artists should come up with some conventions for object naming in blender. Something like "<mapname>_<object>" to ensure there is no real chance that two objects of different maps have the same name.

Textures:
I can only talk from what I see in the export...but I think there might be some problems.

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textures/frostmetal1.png
textures/frostmetal1.png.001
textures/frostmetal1.png.003
textures/frostmetal2.png.001
textures/frostmetal2.png.002
textures/frostmetal2.png.003
textures/metal_cracked1sea
textures/metal_cracked1sea.001
textures/concrete01.png
textures/concrete01.png.002
Please, make sure blender reuses the same image file for the same texture and doesn't create a copy for it. Everytime a texture is copied we end up with a duplicated image file that wastes space.

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textures/wellston_height.psdAhm...no idea if blender can use .psd files but CS and PS for sure can't. So please flatten those images and don't reference to the master images in blender

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textures/fancyendcapbump.j
textures/fancyendcapcolor.
textures/fancyendcapspec.j
textures/quarterendbump.jp
textures/quarterendcolor.j
textures/quarterendspec.jp
textures/weikert_metal_35_
textures/weikert_metal_35_tile
Mhh....you might want to check these again. The file extensions look strange for me.

And for naming materials the same applies as for maps. Also you might want to make sure that the same material is reused when possible and not a .001 copy of it. Having that for some materials in the exported files.

[Aiwendil]

One more thing about textures: In IRC it was mentioned that the best format for them might be direct draw surfaces (.dds). So it may be worth thinking about changing all texture to this format.

And no...this can't be easily done in the exporters. Python::PIL doesn't support .dds and is not available for python3 anyway at the moment (what makes most image manipulting in scripts for blender 2.5 kind of very difficult).
ImageMagick supports converting to dds and has a python interface but looks like it also doesn't support python3 yet. And doing the conversation after the export means that all exported xml files have to be touched again to change the filenames. So the easiest way (for now) would be using .dds right from the start already in blender (I hope blender supports those).