Blender Directions

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Blender Directions

The normal Blender exporter handles shot and texture imagery as well as meshes; it is a full-function export. The shot imagery is placed on a "projection screen" -

-- a piece of physical geometry --- as an animated texture.

Important : When importing OBJ meshes from blender, you should be sure to delete facet normals supplied by Blender. The blender export does not renumber vertices, because blender uses a one vertex/one texture coordinate system similar to SynthEyes. As long as you delete normals, the export will maintain the same vertex numbers as in Blender.

The Blender exporter has some limited support for using the Cycles panorama camera when exporting pure VR-mode = Present or Apply shots. This permits a simpler insertion workflow for 360 VR shots with Blender. You will have to set up the texturing and other materials within the Cycles environment yourself.

When exporting, you can select whether animated meshes produce an armature and bones, or a point cache file placed in a secondary folder (ie exporting scene37b will utilize a scene37b_bpc folder).

Directions for the blender export follow. These are tailored primarily to Blender

2.80 and later. The first directions use the auto-run feature, which is fast and easy once you have it set up, but cannot be used to update existing scenes.

WARNING : using auto-run, be sure to close any existing open blender window first! The new one can open so quickly it's hard to tell which is which, and if you're working on an old one you will get very confused.

1. In SynthEyes, File/Export/Blender (Python)

2. Select the a value in the top Blender version dropdown corresponding to your version of Blender. There are only a few settings, corresponding to general ranges of blender versions. For example, use "2.58+" for blender versions after 2.58, up until the next available setting, ie "2.66+".

3. Adjust the "Blender application" field to reflect where blender is located on your machine (and frequently, which of them to use). The default value of this will never be correct. It will frequently show the right general idea. You'll need to adjust at least the version number.

4. Check the "Open in Blender Automatically" checkbox.

5. Adjust the other settings as needed, see the following Blender Settings section.

6. Click OK and blender will open with the new file.

If you don't have auto-run on (for example because you want to update a file, or will run blender on a different machine), here's what to do to open the exported python file in Blender.

1. Once you've completed the export from SynthEyes (hit OK), start Blender.

2. Click on the Scripting tab at top (2.80), or change one of the views to the blender Text Editor.

3. In the text editor, Open the blender script you exported from SynthEyes.

4. Hit ALT-P or the Run button to run the script

5. To see the match, you'll need to look through the SynthEyes camera, typically Camera01.

6. The export will turn off Relationship Lines in the main view to reduce clutter.

7. Use a Timeline view to scrub through the shot.

8. If parts of the scene or some of the trackers are inexplicably missing, you probably needed to use larger projection screen or clipping distances, export again with larger values.

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