Dear Blender Developers, I started to write a native DAZ DSON import script and got pretty far in just a few days (meshes, armatures, skinning, all fully featured).
One issue is that DSON supports different skin blend factors for different rotation axes of a bone. DAZ calls this TriAx. This is actually patented, but I have written confirmation from DAZ, that they don't object against a DSON import feature in blender, which does support DSON TriAx. TriAx is quite useful. E.g. at the ellbow joint you can distribute the rotation along the axis of the lower arm over the whole lower arm, while the skinning of the rotation along the perpendicular axis is close to the ellbow joint. The only feature required to support TriAx in blender are negative weights in vertex groups. Then TriAx can be implemented by duplicating bones for each axis and adding some rotation copy constratints between them. So I implemented negative vertex weights in Blender 2.73a. It works well, except for the color ramp editor in the user preferences (it works, but display is strange). My main question is, what do you think about negative vertex group weights? There are lots of range checks for vertex group weights in blender, and supporting negative weights would mean removing these. Should negative vertex group weights be made optional? Do .blend files have global options like this? Making this optional in the preferences doesn't make much sense, since it should be enabled when a file which uses this is loaded. Another question is what you generally think about support for patented technology in blender. As I said, I have written confirmation (by email) from DAZ and negative vertex weights as such are not patented so real TriAx is just in the import script. Please share your thoughts on this. Best regards, Michael _______________________________________________ Bf-python mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-python
