3D Asset Pipeline

Setup

1. Download Blender 2.83 or earlier Blender Downloads
2. Get The Blender Addon to export to .egg files by downloading it as Zip File
3. Install The Addon inside Blender by going to Edit -> Preferences -> Addons -> Install -> Navigating to the Zip File -> Pressing Install Addon

Great! You're all set. Maybe you have to restart Blender.

Creating Assets

1. Make a 3D Model in Blender, dont forget to add materials to it
2. Apply Transforms to your Model
3. Go to File -> Export -> Panda3d(.egg)
4. Check Your Models by either checking Pview in the export menu or afterwards starting pview in the console with : pview model.egg (Press L to turn on the lights)

Nice! Those Models are already usable in Panda3d.

Animating

To Animate your Model you have to ensure some things in Blender.

1. All animations have to be created with Bones, or shapekeys. Otherwise they cant be exported.
2. To make an Animation, create your skeleton and Parent your various models or modelparts to the individual bones.
3. Now head to the animation layout and for the bottom window split select: Dope Sheet -> Action Editor. Then Click New Action and name it something like "punch"
4. Create your punch animation by keyframing the bones.
5. Once you've animated the punch animation you can create more actions if you want to. Just make sure they are seperate actions in blender.
6. Now you can export the .egg file again. Make sure you select "All actions as animations" and "Separate Animation files" and you are all set.
7. To test your individual animations in pview, which i recommend, you can do pview model.egg punch.egg

Converting to bam files

We probably want to work with .bam files since they are lighter to load. To convert your files just use the console command egg2bam model.egg model.bam