Plopp and Teddy (was: An interesting presentation and discussion, maybe still is)

Darius Clarke wrote:
>David,

Hi Darius,

>What do you think of Blender 3D for general 3D creation and import to
>Croquet? Too hard? Too difficult to import? or still OK?

Blender 3D is a powerful and free tool for 3D model creation.  It was
originally made as a professional proprietary tool for a design studio
and then later released as freeware.  It has a large active user and
developer community.  It can export to VRML 2 and OBJ formats, both of
which can be imported to Croquet with packages that are available on
Squeakmap.  It can also export BVH format, which is a "bones"
representation of object animation, which recent updates for Jasmine
Croquet can import.  It is a very powerful and useful tool.

All that being said, I don't much like the Blender GUI, as it is not
at all friendly for the casual user.  Some Blender documents describe
the GUI as being workflow-oriented for the professional designer.  It
has a large learning curve.

I still use Blender because of its power and ease of moving content to
Croquet, but I would really prefer to use a more friendly tool.

>Cheers,
>Darius

Cheers,
Dave

Cool. Thanks for your thoughts Dave.
I also know that Blender can represent motion or animation. Would that
be worth importing into Croquet with the model, or can one use simpler
packages for that as well?

Thank you,
Darius

I'm not sure that there is a good answer for that right now.  I
mentioned previously that Blender can export BVH files that can be
read into Croquet Jasmine for model animation.  Outside of that or
buying a professional modeling package like Maya or 3D Studio Max, the
only real choice right now is writing some Smalltalk code to do the
animation in Croquet directly.  There are not a lot of end-user tools
for this within Croquet at the moment.

On 3/4/06, Darius Clarke <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Cool. Thanks for your thoughts Dave.
> I also know that Blender can represent motion or animation. Would that
> be worth importing into Croquet with the model, or can one use simpler
> packages for that as well?