Attempting a Blender to DXF or SVG animation exporter plugin for Blender 2.6

[TL]

Nice work. In the ilda file posted in 11 above, it appears that the corner sensitivity is a little too high, or some other little bug, as occasionally a non-corner edge is drawn inside the wheel and on its side. Other than that, it's good progress and with the faster render times I look forward to trying this again sometime.

Yes, I know. This is the problem with selecting edges in the dxfWriter. Since there is no GUI at the moment a default setting for selecting edges is used. As soon as the GUI is completed, a much finer control about the edges is possible...

Thanks Swamidog.
TL should take all the credit, my exporter is pretty useless.

Until now this was not so much work, the GUI is the challenge...

I tried the DXF renderer. It doesn't seem to work if I put it in "Blender/scripts/freestyle" but does if I put it in "Blender/scripts/freestyle/style_modules". Might be something wrong on my side.

Yes, it has to be in the style_modules dir.[/quote]

Here are two tests I made. I had trouble making ILD SOS save them at constant 30 fps, but LSX didn't have a problem doing that, so I've also included the rtd files.
http://www.2shared.com/file/03Z2PsPP/files.html
I don't have a projector yet, so I have no idea if these will render properly.

I will have a look later...

[TL]

new version with GUI for control of the exported edges.
Download

Install instructions:
copy dxfWriter.py dxfColorMap.py and dxfLibrary130.py to the Blender\2.69\scripts\freestyle\style_modules directory.
install dxfWriterGUI.py as addon:




and enable the dxfWriterGUI addon with the checkmark.

as soon as freestyle is enabled and the dxfWriter module is loaded the settings for dxfWriter appear in the Render Layer panel.

These options are the same as in the Parameter Editor settings...
if the dxfWriter module is not loaded, the settings will not be displayed.

It would be nice, if people using this, would post some pics of their work... :-)

Thomas

[Galvonaut]

Wow, Thomas, WTG!

I might find this handy one day.... when I get blender :P [edit] downloading now[/edit]

Keeping a close eye on this thread

Keith

[TL]

I was really looking forward to this.
I'll try it soon and let you know how it worked for my files.

A plugin like this deserves some documentation. Should I write a pdf/html guide?

That would be cool, currently I don't have the time for this... and I'm not good at writing documentation... :-)

BTW, do the colors export properly now? Drlava sent me an email a while ago explaining how the "sample raster" option in ILD SOS works. It works a bit different than what I and maybe you thought. Its more than just replacing or multiplying the color of the point with the closest pixel color from the image. It takes the color of the point and compares it to the its closest pixels trying to find the best match. I don't think that will work very well without proper DXF vertex colors. What do you think?

Currently I'm working on this and it's almost finished. This was a complete rewrite of the dxf output, since truecolor is only supported by R14 Acad dxf file upwards and the file format is much more complicated...
Also added an own color shader to my freestyle modul to get the correct colors from blender. pyMaterialColorShader does some strange modifications to the colors.

About the lack of support for vertices and lines which do not form a polygon... I just found out that in Blender you can't preview their colors in the 3d view. They are always black when not selected and white when selected (with default theme), so Blender might not be the tool for creating line abstracts... I'm gladat least line particles work with Freestyle, for whatever reason.

When working with line particles, these are rendered as boxes, so these work. Keep the width of the lines as small as possible, else the point count of the converted ilda explodes...

[TL]

new version 0.0.3 Download
Changes:
- true color output ( now outputs R14 dxf files)
- different color shader, which takes directly the material color from the object

[TL]

Nice. I've started writing the user guide from yesterday.
And my first projector will get shipped in few days so I'll make something real with your script.

I can think of only one thing that could be added:
Support for "final" color of each vertice, that is vertex color * material color * texture color.
You might wonder why you'd need texture colors, but there are some cool effects you could easily get with them, like scrolling a seamless gradient texture. What do you think?

I think this is better handled in a color shader, not in the vector output...
In the upcoming blender version 2.70 it's planned to add the ability to append script modules to the "parameter editor mode" so there will be completely new possibilities. And in this context, I would prefer writing a color shader, which is more universal...

[swamidog]

this is really excellent. please keep up the good work.

Here's the small tutorial I've made so far: http://www.2shared.com/document/yvgQGXvx/dxfwriter.html

BTW, I can't get Blender and ILD SOS's "Sample Raster" option to work together very well. The problem is the edges are between the mesh and background, so I usually get the background pixel color assigned to the points instead of the vertice's pixel colors. Any ideas how to avoid this? I think composite nodes might allow to "bleed" the pixels of the objects to the background pixels, but not sure how to do that or if there's a better way.

[TL]

Here's the small tutorial I've made so far: http://www.2shared.com/document/yvgQGXvx/dxfwriter.html

BTW, I can't get Blender and ILD SOS's "Sample Raster" option to work together very well. The problem is the edges are between the mesh and background, so I usually get the background pixel color assigned to the points instead of the vertice's pixel colors. Any ideas how to avoid this? I think composite nodes might allow to "bleed" the pixels of the objects to the background pixels, but not sure how to do that or if there's a better way.

Great tutorial, thanks!
Regarding the sample raster, just use higher value for the default line width in freestyle.

[TL]

yes I think using freestyle. Using the "distance from object" and "distance from camera" it's possible to create depth shadings...

[TL]

these are in the linestyle / color settings...