Building 3D scenes is a complicated process. Much more so than 2D scenes mainly because of the nature of the editing space. With this in mind I have been working on the Blender Sync Tool to change the way 3D assets and data is generated for Defold.
The key benefits of this methodology:
- Blender is a good 3D editing tool. Replicating this capability (or even some of it) in the Defold editor would make the editor become large and cumbersome to use potentially detracting from the benefits of the 2D editing.
- You can associate data with all the objects in Blender as custom properties which are exported and accessible from Defold. Allows you to add meta data to a object node thus, being able to âdesignâ projects partially in Blender.
- The âsyncdâ data can then be adjusted (properties or scripts) and simply run in Defold. Minimising import/export issues that are often one of the biggest resource pipeline issues in game dev or app dev.
- Because there is no âintermediateâ data it is very easy and quick to update resource data changes that occur in Defold, into the Sync Tool.
There are some more benefits coming like multi-user editing, git versioning support, direct github project support (sync to a project on github directly) and much more.
The key goal of all this, is to edit 3D where it makes sense to edit it. Keep the interchange between the target system and Blender as simple and as tight as possible - minimal data modification. In this way development of 3D scenes for Defold become easier and easier to do, which will then make building 3D games/applications much easier in the long run.
Feel free to try it out:
This forum thread is intended to be used as a series of guides and how to use the Sync Tool. I will be posting videos, projects and information on how best to utilize this tool if you want to make 3D scenes in Defold.