DCMF NEW TOOLS DEVELOPEMENT BOOK

THE DIRECTORS CUT MOVIE FOUNDRY

Welcome to the developement page of our latest tool,

THE PLAN

To use blender as a complete tool to import change and export content back to the movies game, using blender.

The tool will be an addon.

between myself, gleem and mike we have come up with some ideas that will work, and one of the ideas was new panels integrated into blenders UI

so as a start to learning python and with blender 2.56's api doc addon, i found that it had script templates, one of which was a simple panel.

so i quite easily used that with small changes and now as you see in the first picture below we now have the beginning of our new tools ui.

the changes you see in the picture are just the start these will be the import buttons for each type of content

but those 4 arent just it we will also inclue

SET    PROP   COSTUME   HEADS    ARMATURE     ACCESSORY

    BACKDROP    HAIR    FACILITY   HAT  LATEX- HEAD   LOT- PROP

    WEATHER     ANIMATION    FLM

next stage is creation stage for content

while making your content you will need to give it properties like naming etc, we will make this as easy as clicking a dropdown menu choosing what you want, also tickboxes and input boxes and sliders. in other words everything you need in their own panels specific to the movies, so you wont have to worry.

once you have everything in place, for example we created a costume

when you click export it will do some checks similar to preflight but behind the scenes if there are errors it will tell you exactly what the issue is and where to correct it from a pop up box. If the costume is good then it will create all ini's cos file etc and place the files in there correct folders of the games directory.

once export has completed .. you will then be given a push button that asks you if you want to open the movies game

hopefully this will turn into a comprehensive look at how we do this.

you are welcome to comment on this.. maybe give us some ideas which we will discuss live on the mike and steve modding hour on saturdays

ok a few hours on and with gleems help we now have buttons