The fourth Blender Google SoC Project

Submitted by Palle Raabjerg via the Python Foundation, this project aims to create exporting/importing tools for Soya3D, a Python game engine project. The Soya 3D website describes it as:

Soya 3D is a very high level 3D engine for Python. Soya aims at being to 3D what Python is to programming : fast to learn, easy to use and all while keeping good performance! Our goal is to propose a complete architecture to realise Free (GPL) games with professional quality entirely in Python.

Palle writes:

My proposal is about writing Soya3D importer tools, and about improving, or rewriting the Soya3D exporter tools for Blender.

Currently, no Soya3D importers exist for Blender. This means you cannot import any Soya3D or Cal3D models into Blender. This can be inconvenient for both the game developer, as he needs to publish the .blend files to allow people to modify models, and for a gamer community surrounding a project, as they can’t modify models unless the developer publishes the .blend files. (Note: This might be a perfectly okay and even preferable situation for some proprietary game developers, but Soya3D is built on a philosophy of openness and freedom, making this a more important feature.)

The Soya3D exporter tools basically consists of the blender2soya and blender2cal3d scripts. blender2soya is currently used for static (non-animated) models, and blender2cal3d is used for exporting animated skeletal models to the Cal3D format, which can also be used with Soya. These two scripts lack many features, however, and still contains known flaws.

The full description is available on the Soya3D Wiki. Congratulations, Palle!

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