Blender Middleware

We use Blender 2.69, since it still supports 16 color layers (they were reduced to 8 in 2.70 onwards) and some of our blendfiles use a lot of color layers for compositing. There might also be backwards incompatibility issues with some of our viewport rendering addons in later versions of Blender after the viewport refactor.

Contents

• Unity template project, under Unity

  • Editor line/colormap postprocessors
  • Embeddable Blender scripts under Assets/Blender
  • Test scene to make sure all features are working

• Blender modules and addons, under Blender

  • Improved vertex color painting tool
  • Color data for line primitives
  • Color rendering for lines in the viewport
  • Color compositing using mesh/line color layers with python
  • 3D gradient coloring tools
  • Line data and colormap exporters for Unity
  • Save and restore mesh selections
  • Quicksave and backup features
  • cc python module for programmatic usage of the features above.

• Customized FBX exporter for Blender (monkeypatches existing io_scene_fbx addon)

  • support for color alpha (layers named <Layer>.Alpha in blender)
  • support for using Export scene, if present in blendfile
  • customized unity3d_defaults function (which is called by Unity)

• Customized blender ui config files (startup.blend and userprefs.blend) that have the tools and extensions above integrated.

• sync.sh shell script for easy installation if you prefer the terminal (including WSL). See comments in sync.sh for full usage.

Installation

1. Download and install Blender 2.69: http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.69/

   There should only be one instance of blender on your system, so that Unity doesn't accidentally use the wrong instance.

2. Copy the contents of Blender/2.69 in the repo to your user scripts path (make sure to remove any previous versions of this middleware from that folder first, and remove the __pycache__ folder if it exists):

   • Mac: /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Blender/2.69
   • Win: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.69
   • Linux: ~/.config/blender/2.69

   If you prefer to copy over the addons and not the startup config files and keep your own, only copy over Blender/2.69/scripts. The startup.blend and userprefs.blend config files won't be copied over but you'll have to enabled the addons manually in order for them to be active when Unity invokes blender for FBX import. You can find all the addons under the Cardboard tab.

   Alternately, you can use the included sync.sh shell script to copy the files. Create a sync.config file in the repository root (the same location as sync.sh), and define BLENDER_USER_PATH which should point to the user scripts path (one of the paths above).

   Run ./sync.sh system to copy the files over.

   Run ./sync.sh system noconfig to copy the files over without the startup config files.

3. Open Unity/Blender-Middleware/Assets/TestScene/Meshes/Test.blend in Blender and save the scene. This should trigger the embedded autoexport.py script which should rewrite some line files and some colormap pngs. Files regenerated under Unity/Blender-Middleware/Assets/TestScene should be:

   • Lines/TestBox.lines
   • Lines/TestCube.lines
   • Textures/TestCubeCol.png
   • Textures/TestCubeLinesCol.png

   Check the console output for any saving/export related errors.

4. Open the included Unity project in the repo with the latest version of Unity. If everything was set up right then there should be no errors or warnings during initial import. Check the following in the included Test.unity scene:

   • The Cube and Cube_Lines game objects should appear purple (these objects are using colormap textures and should be blended halfway between their primary colors and aux colors).

   • The Box and Box_Lines game objects should be a gradient from blue to green from top to bottom (these objects have their primary and aux colors blended via our homebrew secondary color hack via Mesh.uv2).

   • Right-click on Lines/TestBox.lines and select reimport, to make sure the lines postprocessor runs without errors/warnings.

   • Right-click on Textures/TestCubeCol.png and select reimport, to make sure the colormap postprocessor runs without errors/warnings.

   If there aren't any errors/warnings at this point, the middleware should be working ok.

Updating

After pulling the latest changes from github, follow step 2-4 and make sure there aren't any warnings or errors in both the system and Unity's console/terminal.