BlenderOMV - Blender as a networked world editor
| Author: | Toni Alatalo, Playsign - toni at playsign net |
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NOTE: since this early experiment in July 2009, the work is being continued at http://wiki.realxtend.org/index.php/3d_Creation_Suite_Integration_Working_Group - but that's just notes so far, this is the only thing with actually functional little code now.
A Second Life / Opensim compatible client running inside Blender doing two-way synchronization of the scene data. A minimal proof of concept done, features live synching of changes in the position of a single object in the scene, either way. No shape info, object names or anything like that is synched in this first minimal test - just the position.
Benefits of Blender for object placement include full featured viewport manipulation, multiple views to the same scene at the same time, and a nice outliner which shows all objects and that can be used to select them etc.
The idea of using Blender as a live world editor has intrigued me since got involved with Second Life like things when started to work on Realxtend in late 2007. It would be quite straightforward to get basics for off-line scene editing to work by implementing import and export for the xml encoded OAR format that the Opensim supports on the server. However, being able to use Blender as an editor the live sims on the net might be even more useful. It has been done with Blender before using Verse.
This minimal proof-of-concept implementation uses LibOMV? via Python.NET. I tried PyOGP? first, and may switch to that later 'cause it uses non-blocking coroutines (eventlet, greenlet) which may be best for the integration. Blender 2.5, getting finished for first release towards the end of 2009, has a rewritten internal event system and will support networking better (via pynotifiers or something).
Verse for it is not targeted for Blender 2.5 yet, but perhaps later. Verse support for OpenSim might be interesting too. But this way to integrate to Blender works against unmodified OpenSim and even Second Life.
This work is not currently related to Realxtend, but we will consider Blender integration within the Realxtend project when plan coming work in August 2009.
For the adventurous, here is the blend file with the py sources and the scriptlink setup .. run connect.py and start using, default connection is to local opensim. Requires python.net in your python path and libomv in default dir or setting the libomv path in the connect script.
Bconf2009 --antont, Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:45:29 +0300 reply
i'm considering writing a paper about this to http://www.blender.org/community/blender-conference/call-for-participation/
'Integrating Blender with World Servers' or something like that? or with clients? discussing the options i guess.
ParametricObject? in BlendeR --antont, Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:13:55 +0300 reply
http://yorik.orgfree.com/tutorials/parametricobjects-blender.html that one seems to go beyound prims :)
something to consider for the rex content model!
python.net lib for python 2.6 --antont, Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:42:19 +0300 reply
just extract the two files, clr.pyd an Python.Runtime.dll from this zip to your python2.6 lib site-packages dir, so blender 2.49 should find them. http://www.playsign.fi/download/pythonnet26.zip .