Blender 2.69 DirectX export addon - bugs in the script?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I have a rigged model with 3 (animation) actions. The DirectX export interface implies that actions can be exported as animationsets. After much experimentation, I finally got multiple animations exported to the .x file.

Frist, Kudos to Chris Foster (the author whose name appears in the init.py file) as the export DOES work.

However, the export settings are somewhat confusing and it took a bit of experimentation to get multiple animationsets to export at all.

For posterity, in the export dialog, I check:
Export Selected Objects Only (I select the mesh and the armature)
Export meshes
Export Normals
Export UV coordinates
Export Materials
Export Skin Weights
Export Armature Bones
(I skip Export Rest Position)
Export Animations
Include Frame Rate (my app uses this)
Export Actions as AnimationSets

It appears that should do it. However, ONLY IF I check:

Attach Unused Actions to First

will it, in fact, export ANY actions as animationsets! Without that one option checked, only the current animation gets exported. With it checked, it exports all actions, including a (non-existent) Default_Action animationset which has one (static) keyframe, which, I suppose is a generated “unused action.” I have no “unused” actions.

I don’t know python or the API well enough to know if that’s how it’s supposed to work. The init file says it was written for Blender 2.66. Was there some change after that rev (as mentioned in title I’ve got 2.69) that screwed things up? Is there a reason that export option is required? Can it be fixed?

It’s sort of a minor problem, but requires that each exported file be edited to delete the unwanted Default animationset.

2

I stumbled upon this because I’m writing my own exporter for my format. From what i saw in the docs it seems that blender stores the actions differently than one would expect. The way the animations are written to the x format is that you have an armature which has multiple different actions defined, which is useful in a game where you have the action for walking and for standing, falling and so on.
Please correct me if I’m wrong but from what i found out the way blenders stores the Actions internally is the other way around. It has a set of animations defined for the scene (http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_63_14/bpy.types.BlendData.html#bpy.types.BlendData) and for each armature only one action (http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_63_14/bpy.types.Armature.html where it says animation data) which is active. All other actions are unused, which is why they get deleted if you do not check F in the Action Editor.

BTW: I know that it is an old post and people in the forums tend to say you should not reopen old post, but I don’t know why you shouldn’t because I would have been happy to find this out earlier, so I’m writing this for someone who otherwise might be asking the same question. Feel free to delete the post if you disagree.