Blender planning on more Godot integration

emo10001

With the death of the BGE, the Blender foundation is announcing that they are planning on "bringing back a good real-time interactive 3D system in Blender" and mentions Godot specifically for more work on further/better integration.

https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-May/049438.html

Good news again :smiley:

-emo

marty

Holy frijoles! Blender should just fold their engine work into Godot and make Godot the 'preferred' engine for use with Blender. A Blender-Godot union would make tons of sense for FOSS game development.

MagicLord

Blender real time won't be necessary if Blender content is directly streamed to Godot when you make changes. I don't see myself making gameplay in Blender and coding again the game in Godot. While i would like Godot engine directly integrated in Blender viewport.

emo10001

To be clear, integrating Godot into Blender is not what they are talking about doing. They're planning on making it easier to get assets out of Blender and into Godot....improving the Blender to Godot pipeline.

-emo

Ace_Dragon

@marty said: Holy frijoles! Blender should just fold their engine work into Godot and make Godot the 'preferred' engine for use with Blender. A Blender-Godot union would make tons of sense for FOSS game development.

There is some speculation that it won't be a full-fledged game engine though. Among the reported things it will be is a tool for animators and a hub that will enhance Blender's ability to link to external solutions (such as Godot). The description of it being the latter was just recently posted on Blenderartists by someone who was at the BF's new building.

MagicLord

@emo10001 said: To be clear, integrating Godot into Blender is not what they are talking about doing. They're planning on making it easier to get assets out of Blender and into Godot....improving the Blender to Godot pipeline.

-emo

I would like Godot to import Blender 2.8 files, do the conversion behind the scenes and be able to stay sync with changes to the Blender files and to an automatic re import. This means , you import a Blender file, and Godot will keep the blender file path and update the assets whenever you make changes on the original blender file.

Something like this one https://github.com/unity3d-jp/MeshSync

Calinou

I would like Godot to import Blender 2.8 files, do the conversion behind the scenes and be able to stay sync with changes to the Blender files and to an automatic re import.

Blender files are not an interchange format and weren't designed for use outside of Blender.

I think a more sensible solution would be to automatically export the scene to glTF or another format when saving in Blender. This way, one wouldn't need to re-export the mesh every time to view changes in Godot, which helps reduce iteration times. There's probably an add-on for this already, I haven't looked.

keltwookie

@Calinou said: ...There's probably an add-on for this already, I haven't looked.

Here it is :

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-Exporter

Calinou

@keltwookie said: Here it is :

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-Exporter

By "automatically export", I meant an add-on that would automatically perform the export task when you save a .blend file, regardless of the format you're exporting to (it would remember the format and the path you last exported to).

MagicLord

@Calinou said:

I would like Godot to import Blender 2.8 files, do the conversion behind the scenes and be able to stay sync with changes to the Blender files and to an automatic re import.

Blender files are not an interchange format and weren't designed for use outside of Blender.

Unity is able to deal with Blender files directly.

Last time i checked Glft it crashed and didn't work with animations. I don't know when Godot will be fully stable and working with the announced glFT, but right now i stay with the reliable and stable way to import models that is better collada exporter.

keltwookie

@Calinou Misunderstood sorry

@MagicLord I just begin tests with glFT (v2.0), so I don't know much about it but this work appears a nice solution to export a whole blend file. As far as I know, and if you only export meshes + images textures, collada works very well, But of course, if you want to export animations/rigging, it could be more complex, maybe due to naming conventions. Let's hope that the Ragdoll system will fix this. Anyway, for my part, I use Blender for 2 things only: Modeling and texturing. For the other stuff, I think more wise to do all into Godot.

Megalomaniak

@MagicLord said:

Unity is able to deal with Blender files directly.

not exactly: unity keeps track of blend files last modification date in its projects folder and essentially runs blender from command line with commands to export that blend file as fbx so unity could import the fbx. It's honestly an overcomplicated solution but I guess not too different from what @Calinou proposed.

MagicLord

@Megalomaniak said:

@MagicLord said:

Unity is able to deal with Blender files directly.

not exactly: unity keeps track of blend files last modification date in its projects folder and essentially runs blender from command line with commands to export that blend file as fbx so unity could import the fbx. It's honestly an overcomplicated solution but I guess not too different from what @Calinou proposed.

I drag and drop my blender files in a project and they got imported, and thta's it. From a user perspective, it's great.