Blender: Collada Animation export plugin

[JeffR]

Hey guys,

It's not quite ready yet, but I wanted to put a heads up out there for anyone using blender and having problems getting your animations to bake/export right when using IK controls(such as with my Red Guy rig), I'm writing an exporter script specifically for exporting collada animations.

https://github.com/Areloch/Blender_Collada_Anim_Export

Again, not ready yet, but I figured I'd notate it here. What this'll do is when you go to export a selected armature with it, you'll pick one of 3 export modes:

1) Current Action Only, where it exports only the currently set action on the armature to it's own file

2) All Actions, Single File, where it exports all the actions on the current armature, but appends them all into a single file

3) All Actions, Separate Files, where it exports all th actions on the current armature, but each action gets it's own file

What it'll do is it creates a new temp action on the armature, and copies the action(s) into it. Then it runs through each frame of the temp animation and does a visual keyframe of position, rotation and scale. This uses the world transforms as opposed to local offsets, so it accounts for bone constraints like IK and the sort. Then, with the visual transforms of each frame baked, it exports the collada as normal. After that it clears out the temp action which will be cleared when you close blender.

This'll let you use IK controllers and other bone constraints and be able to just simply click to export, rather than needing a bunch of additional steps to get it out there. It should be rig-agnostic, though I'm testing it with the Red Guy rig I created.

If you've got any ideas or suggestions, feel free to toss them in here, I'll be keeping updates on this as I go. It won't be blisteringly fast progress as I mostly work on this during lunch at work, but I want this for my personal pipeline, so it'll get done at some point :P