Matt Ebb

After continuous small incremental improvements, it’s time to release a new version of the 3Delight/Blender render engine exporter. This version now requires blender 2.58 and adds a few new features, continuing to round out support for getting geometry data out of Blender. The main additions include:

• Exporting geometry to RIB archives, either manually (File → Export → RIB Archive) or at render time, automatically. Animated RIB archive file sequences can be exported to disk too, and rendered appropriately.
• Rendering blender objects as procedural geometry (Object Properties → Renderman Geometry panel). There’s basic support for DynamicLoad DSOs, RunProgram procedurals, Archives and DelayedReadArchives.
• Instancing blender objects on particles – full deformation and transformation motion blur is supported
• Exporting primitive variables from custom mesh data (such as vertex groups, vertex colors, and uv sets), with some convenient options for default UV sets and colors. Particles can also have primitive variables too, exporting per-point data such as particle age, velocity, lifetime, etc.
• Exporting blender fluid with motion blur
• Exporting blender curve objects as either renderman curve primitives (no animation supported yet due to limitations in the blender API), or as tessellated polygon mesh or subdivision mesh objects (animation supported).

Download the new addon here: render_3delight_0.6.0.zip

As always, feedback and questions are welcome in the comments here.

I’ve now updated the 3Delight/Blender exporter to be compatible with Blender 2.57. Hopefully now there’s a ‘stable’ release, the Python API will fluctuate less and I can spend whatever spare time I have on developing this further, rather than fixing it to make it work!

The bpy API has changed recently to be stricter about where and when it will allow modifying scene data. This has had the effect of preventing some things happening as automatically as I would like, and I’ve had to make some things a bit more manual. Now, before using shaders for the first time, you need to click a button ‘Initialise Shader Parameters’ will will read the data from the shader file on disk and generate the UI inside Blender for it. This only needs to be done once on blender startup, and once when you use a new shader. It will automatically initialise all shaders correctly at render time, so it should still work rendering from the command line. I’d like this to happen all automatically behind the scenes but until there are new features added to Blender to support this, it’ll have to do.

As well as fixes, there are couple of new features. It now supports motion blurred dynamic hair (strands), deep shadow maps, and motion blurred shadows/ray tracing via the samplemotion attribute. The last two were contributed by Magnus Loefgren – thanks!

Get the new package here: render_3delight_0.5.4b.zip

edit 10/05/2011: Released a 0.5.4b version, with path handling fixes for Windows – download above

I’ve been very short on time lately and haven’t had much of a chance to look into fixing the 3Delight/Blender addon to work with recent Blender Python API changes. Jeff Doyle (nfz) however, has generously gone through the code and updated it to work with a current Blender SVN version (as of today, r35311). I haven’t been able to spend a huge amount of time testing it, but on a brief inspection it seems to be working well.

Since you’ve been waiting for a new working version, I’ll release Jeff’s changes now, and hopefully spend a bit more time soon with some other fixes.

Get the new package here: render_3delight_0.5.2.zip