[X3D-Ecosystem] Blender X3D Exporter

[Bergstrom, Aaron]

John,

It’ll be a bit before I can really get to it. I’ve ordered Blender Character animation and Blender Python API books. So sometime after the new year probably.

By then I should have the next version of RawKee for Maya released, and then I’ll take a real stab the blender stuff.

Maybe at that point, when I understand the Blender guts a bit better, we can work on it together.

Aaron

From: John Carlson <yottzumm at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2025 5:10 AM
To: X3D Ecosystem public discussion <x3d-ecosystem at web3d.org>
Cc: Bergstrom, Aaron <aaron.bergstrom at und.edu>
Subject: Re: [X3D-Ecosystem] Blender X3D Exporter

Blender is also probably the only free tool for X3D to glTF, so I hope we get to the I of I/O as well.

I’m here if you need help on any Blender/X3D stuff, but I’m not extremely familiar with either, especially the Blender GUI and node system.  I know very little about the Blender API, other than what I gleaned from addons and searches.  What I will be pursuing soon is soft body physics in Blender and how it can be realized in X3D, at first separate from HAnim.

I am most familiar with HAnim and animation in Blender.  But I’m fairly new to the concept of actions (TimeSensors).

What I think you might find is a large gaps between Blender and X3D.  On the Blender side, I would look towards EMPTY objects for X3D stuff, perhaps using a specialized naming scheme.   There are also places to stuff custom data in Blender objects as well, but I’ve not used them.  And obviously, we will be looking to enhance X3D with features Blender has, like soft body physics.

You’ll probably want to maintain both an armature-based skeleton and an alternative skeleton, unless you can find another way besides armature to do HAnimJoint skinCoordWeight and skinCoordIndex on export.   There can be linkages between the armature and normal objects (feature points for example) which might be difficult to figure out.  And of course, we want to handle armature from existing Blender models.

On Sun, Nov 30, 2025 at 2:33 AM Bergstrom, Aaron via X3D-Ecosystem <x3d-ecosystem at web3d.org<mailto:x3d-ecosystem at web3d.org>> wrote:
All,

Today I ported a portion of the RawKee I/O classes to Blender… well the “O” portion of I/O anyway. And by that, I mean I removed the Maya specific API calls, and did a very rudimentary stub out for Blender.

I haven’t pushed any of it to the Blender repo yet and probably wont for a while, as I still have some work to do to fully understand how Blender works under the hood.

I have some experimentation to do with CGE assets for blender, which I believe will help me get started.

The way I see it, this work was a necessary step in order to support Houdini export and the development of the USD/X3D file translator. So even if this group ends up not wanting to add these classes to the Blender X3D exporter repo, it’s still worth the time I put into it.

Aaron
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