Collada small improvement for armature imports

Hi;

I have again started working on the Collada Module. It is not much that is improved so far, but maybe it can be helpful to transfer Rigs from other tools to Blender with less pulling of hair:

New importer options:

  • Leaf bones are now better placed. I think that the leaf bone orientation is now preserved as given in the Collada file
  • But i have also added a Fix leaf bone orientation option, which can be helpful when the exporting program is a bit sloppy with its Joint definitions.
  • And finally i added a bone chain finder which allows to find “most reasonable chains of bones” which will be automatically connected.

I am aware that there are still many more basic issues to be solved. So please don’t expect me to solve all problems of the past 5 years within a week :cool:

What we have for 2.73 is documented in the Release_Notes/2.73/Import-Export

You should go to the Godot engine website and check out their Collada exporter, as it’s supposedly a noticeably improved version of the default Blender one.

There might be some ideas to copy from there.

Thanks for the hint. However i am currently working on improving Blender’s Collada Importer, which is a complete different story as this tool needs to understand Collada files “from all the other tools” which is almost impossible imho. So i try to concentrate on the most common tools from where Blender users might want to import Collada files to Blender.

Therefore i hope to get some feedback here from users who need to import their collada files to Blender. I hope that in the long term this will also improve the Collada exporter.

I want to import collada from DazStudio, but the only guide I have found for this is from about 4 years ago and doesn’t seem to fully work. It imports, but there is no armature.

Do you happen to know a way to do this?

@beachdancer,
What version of daz studio and blender are you using? mine works fine
it’s most likely something to do with your export settings

@gaia,
However, there’s one problem i’ve had with importing daz studio rigs for a very very long time. the bones at the end of the bone chains (eg fingertips and toes) are not imported correctly. The roots are positioned well, but not so the tails. the tails just point upwards in the global z azis.

It could be a problem with daz studio’s exporter because i tried importing the collada files back into daz studio and the problem persisted. But it could also mean that both blender’s and daz’s importers aren’t perfect. It’d be great if you could look into that.

For me this works.
But as soon as the file contains shape keys the importer crashes.