Drivers - Development to the Next Level
Hello Guys,
I was working on a project - building high fidelity automotive prototype with Blender 2.80 and above. I start thinking how this can develop to something even more serious in future, cause currently I was able to bind all properties in a sequence of behaviors which made this prototype look very cool, and I love it.
Cool is in Blender because of 3 major things:
It is real-time based!
It is fully adjustable!
It is property driven, high fidelity scenario!
However, now going forward, I see what can be improved there and it be basically related to Blender itself.
Simply using the drivers to showcase a product, behavior is fine. Going forward to build this as real part of a SW product this should be transformable data. For example now, IF my prototype was able to be imported with the drivers directly in Unity or Unreal Engine, or Godot - with open readable relations as in Blender, this would be really cool! It will gives, directly logical connection between objects/ shaders/ animations based on Driver property relation represented directly in Blender.
For this purpose I think Blender ADD-ON need to be build for any of the engines. All Drivers for — Transformation — Rotation — Scales + basic BSDF material properties relation need to be translated to any for the GAME engines (Unity#C; Unreal -C++; or Godot )
Example: Unity already has constraints which might be able to replicate the functions of our Blender Drivers? What do you think???
4 Comments
Are you asking for the ability to export drivers? That would first be a lot of work and second every game engine is doing it differently
I think there should be a possibility to get the unbaked drivers for use in a graphics engine. There are multiple ways how that could be implemented: One option would be to write drivers to an extensible 3D file format like glTF, which can be interpreted by the engine. In this case, the glTF export of Blender would have to be extended. Another option would be to provide a .blend import library which supports drivers, which does not have the GPL restrictions so that it can be used in a greater variety of products.
SilaS, Yes, can you imagine having such power within Blender, being able to export drivers as a logical constraint from Blender to Unity for example, or to Unreal?
We need to translate the following: 1/ LOCATION; ROTATION; SCALE and their relations first 2/ Second is to see how we can ensure Drivers in combination with Shaders as a bridge from Blender /Eevee to Unity or Unreal - for application development, which will make this really practical.
***---QUESTION TO ALL OF YOU: Once building the scene in a blender adding the drivel logics etc. why we have to re-build this again in Unity or Unreal>?>? Spending another time in another environment. At least we should be able to translate the logic and save lot's of time for animation and other realtime adjustments. I think this is completely possible, just need to be a part of the roadmap for the future. Blender could be a great tool for prototyping and logic behavior before real-time implementation - packing it to the app or .exe.
Any comments from developers?