Hey folks,

I just spent the afternoon trying to get SimPE to import one stupid little object. And here I was getting excited about the new and 'improved' obj. import/exporter that came with 2.41
To save you all the trouble of losing hair over this (little clumps on the floor all around me) here's some observations:

- Blender tends to assign materials, expecially to newly imported objects. Delete them SimPE doesn't like them. Never did.

- The newfangled export window has tons of options. Just leave them. The uv's and materials don't seem to have much effect on Simpe-compatibility (especially if you've already deleted the materials).
BUT you need to click the 'normals' button. Otherwise you get a nasty 'Index out of range' window in Simpe.

- With the objects I tested, SimPE gave a parsing error. This doesn't effect the object much, but to avoid it, run the game through UV-mapper first.

any more info is much appreciated

I found that too. I also have problems with exporting - Blender crashes a lot during export but from what I have observed, usually if one of these conditions is met:

1. You are re-exporting and your first Material is NOT "Material" (ie Material.001 - see above) Material assignment by Blender is NOT erased by pressing the Delete Material button. Your next material will always be sequencial to the one you deleted (ie, mistake made, assigned then deleted 'Material" the next one will be "Material.001" regardless and that sets the condition for a crash on export as above.

2. If you are re-exporting and there is a "yourfile.mtl" that matches the 'yourfile.obj" from a previous export in the directory you are saving to

3. If an export has failed and you are trying again and there is an empty "yourfile.obj" in the directory you are saving to (made by Blender before it crashes)

I had the problem of a file that simply would not export. Eventually, I cleaned up the working directory, tried again, failed, and then I ran 'Window Washer' in desperation to clean up any temp files that may be hidden somewhere and it worked on next attempt. I don't know if that is coincidence or Blender keeps a temp file it refers to - so maybe it was just luck...

Plus those damned inverting faces you told me about..even being careful I still come out with half an object invisible lol

With all those export options, I am not sure what to include or not. Sometimes it works sometimes not (index out of range!!! Arrrggghhhh) But what bothers me a bit is when it does work, is my .OBJ file larger than it needs to be because I have included something that could safely be left out. SimPE ALWAYS gives me an error (usually non fatal but enough to make a person worry if the file is OK), so that is no help..

daryl,
the 'warning' error was there before, in 2.40
you can avoid that by loading and saving in uv-mapper, but this only works for the warning error, not the 'index out of range' one
in truth, you don't have to include that much, only the normals and the uv-map (if you already uv'ed it), the others don't seem to do that much
I haven't checked if the objects are that much larger. It's a good point...

The size of my test OBJ varies between 68k and 230k depending on which options I choose..not that it will load in SimPE anyway.I am almost thinking of going back to 2.40

daryl,
in that case, I recommend 2.38, actually
the original obj. plugin was made for that version, and it never gave me any errors
meanwhile, I've succesfully imported several objects out of blender, using the options I mentioned in the first post. it's still not working for you?

It's working, most of the time. Something is a factor in 1 out of five times SimPE won't touch the finished .OBJ but I have no idea what. Maybe it's just flakey? My wish for the day though is that I could build and colour my object in one program rather than having to use 3..I was playing around with colouring and texturing in Blender and it is so much easier to work on your actual item than a flat weirdly distorted line drawing of it in Paint.NET *sighs* (can you tell that part gives me a problem) btw..this inverted faces problem I keep having - what is the Blender command to change an inverted face? The "Invert" menu option in Blender just changed from selected faces to unselected faces...so far I have just been deleteing the face or vertices and redoing them but that didn't work today on something. This is probably not the right place to ask too..We need a 'Help, My Blender Sucks' forum..lol

*giggle*
Blender lends itself to love-hate relationships, yes
to be honest, I haven't found that command yet (the one that inverts just on face)
there's a 'mirror' command, but that tends to turn a lot of stuff inside out, I think it keeps the vertices connected, while it flips, so you get weird shapes
what I usually do is delete the face, select the vertices that made it up and pres 'f' to refill
to my knowledge this works best with triangles (so you probably want to select two opposite corner vertices and press 'f' first, to make the diagonal), but you still have an inverted one sometimes, with that technique

with the ones that didn't work, are you sure Blender didn't sneak in some materials?
it does that sometimes, when you import objects
oh, and just to make you feel better about uv-maps, here's a tut on texturing on the actual mesh
http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewto...t=landis+airman

btw, have you tried mesh tool? for importing meshes that didn't work?
I'm just asking, cause I haven't experimented with mesh tool much. but it might be more forgiving on importing objects

I haven't tried Mesh Tool..I'm already on learning curve overload...

yes, I can imagine
I'll try it myself when I have the chance and let you know

i figured out how to change inverted faces in Blender. Have 'Show Normals' on..select the faces with the blue lines facing INWARDS and then select 'Normals >> Flip' It's easy when you know how...pffft

oooh *takes notes*
that's interesting thanks for letting everyone know
that's some more hair I won't be losing

You can actually see it happening if you have "Show Normals On" - as you resize smaller, they start flipping as you said- I wonder why Blender assumes any small object you make, you WANT to be inside out.

hehe,
to be honest, I haven't had that many flipped vertices
thank god, considering I only hear how to fix them now,
I think the trick is to zoom in close enough. That, or using object mode. If you scale (or rotate) in object mode it works completely different than in edit mode. It's particularly handy if you've made the mesh and are scaling it waaay down to the maxis goal-mesh