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The fourth Blender Google SoC Project

11

logo.gifYesterday we reported that three Blender projects were accepted for the Google Summer of Code. There is, however, a fourth Blender related project: Soya3D exporting/importing tools for Blender.

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!

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

11 Comments

  1. Soya3D is defintly not useless, Nor is this preposal. There are Quake Files and Doom and so one down the list, but when you go onto other engine like Ogre, Panda and Soya, import tools just are not there. Someone may model/animate something in 3D Max and will need someone to text something to change soimething on the model, all the while they don't have access to 3D Max. Animation is defintly the hardest to import into blender let alone a binary format.

  2. I'm not against, but it's not the most important at the moment.

    It's just my opinion, just mine, don't follow

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