Collada Import/Export Scripts for Blender 2.49b

These scripts were written to export geometry with or without a texture from Blender 2.49b into the Collada format and then be able to import the Collada file back into Blender. I used the Python minidom to create the Collada file and to parse the Collada file to recreate the mesh in Blender.

Programming Challenges

For this project what caused me the biggest problems were certain bugs in Blender 2.49b that I had to work around as it was the only version of Blender we were allowed to use. For example when an object with a lot of faces such as a geosphere was created inside Blender or imported into Blender with it's own importers, (format didn't matter it happend with Collada as well as .obj and a few other formats) for some reason the object would be made of a combination of quadralaterals and triangles which caused problems when you would import the mesh. In order to get around this I used an experimental function in Blender that converts quads to triangles and then exported the mesh. The only problem with this method is that it duplicates the mesh and unfortnately there is no way to delete the duplicate mesh from a Python script without saving the file (which I did not want to do in case the user did not want to save). So unfortunately the export script will duplicate the mesh.

Downloads

Download the scripts here: ScriptsDownload