Thread: Blender scene graph?

  1. #1
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Blender scene graph?

    Is there such a thing? Creating a fancy model in Blender does me no good if I do not have the scene graph to parse in order to render the same thing in my rendering system.

    How are you some of you rendering complex models with several textures and render states? I'm assuming some of you are using 3DS Max and plugins b/c short of that I cannot see any open source solutions to the issue.

  2. #2
    Just a pushpin. bernt's Avatar
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    I'm not sure what you're talking about with scene graphs (open scene graph? there's an exporter here) but blender can use external renderers without exporting anything.

    Blender - External renderers
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  3. #3
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    I would like to implement a scene graph in my own system so I can draw more complex objects. OpenSceneGraph appears to be hard-coded to OpenGL and I don't want to port it to Direct3D. Aqsis does look interesting.

  4. #4

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    I haven't dealt with reading Blender files (except in the case where it could export to a file format I wanted). Poking around a bit, it seems Blender's scene graph is for internal use, but by Python scripting you can have access to this information.

    Links may be a bit dated so I'm not sure if they're still valid/useful.

    Python API design

    blender.org - Architecture

    What project is this being used for Bubba?

    EDIT:

    Here's a link to 'The Octagon Engine.' It implements some rendering on complex scenes (animated models with multiple textures, shader programs, stencil shadow volumes, etc). He doesn't implement a 'scene graph' in the traditional sense, but the source and demo is available at the bottom of this page, might give you some ideas. I think it's a few years old but by no means obsolete.

    http://www.paulsprojects.net/opengl/...n/octagon.html
    Last edited by BobMcGee123; 04-09-2010 at 04:01 PM.
    I'm not immature, I'm refined in the opposite direction.

  5. #5
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Thanks Bob. I've decided to go about making my own scene graph and a C# based editor to support it. My goal is to support several various texture blend operations and assign these operations to texture stages. After that I will be able to do light mapping, detail mapping, etc. and my objects will look much better. I'm designing the node system and writing the renderer to use the system right now and later I'll design the editor. This does mean I have a two-phase content pipeline since the editor will be used to 'spice up' the object but Blender's graph doesn't look like it will help me much. And since I do not have 3DS max and therefore no developer support I can't just write a 3DS Max plugin like most studios probably do.

    What project is this being used for Bubba?
    I'm going to use this for my little space tech demo I keep messing around with from time to time. I just converted the cameras and orientations to quaternions and started some UI programming.
    It's just something to tinker with here and there. Right now you can fly around and I've spawned a couple of baddies to harass you. The baddies are a bit too good and will chase you to the ends of the galaxy before throwing in the towel. Need to put some limitations, inaccuracies, and constraints in the AI system.

    Thanks for the links. Just trying to improve the 'look' of the demo and a scenegraph for objects is the only way I think I can do it in a data-driven renderer.
    Last edited by VirtualAce; 04-10-2010 at 01:27 PM.

  6. #6

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    Hey Bubba, just wondering if you've had any progress since your last update.
    I'm not immature, I'm refined in the opposite direction.

  7. #7
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Nope. Still working on it. Have been looking at Collada to ease the pain of exporting to/from different formats.

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