Blender and soldier_rigged.dae

#1 It looks like there are collada format items that are not supported by Blender 2.60. I am guessing that is why they are missing when I re-export the file from Blender. The cool thing it is mostly working except for the animations.

I am going to explore reading in the files using lxml and see if I cannot create a DAE diff between the two files. If I can do that then I can create a tool that will extract the differences between the two files and put back the missing information. No, not perfect, maybe even a bad idea, but it will be interesting to see the results. My goal here is to put back anything that allows the skeleton to function with the animations provided by the soldier. If I can accomplish that then it will allow me to create characters that use that skeleton.

If this does not work then I will just start over with the same skeleton or similar and just do my own animations.

#2 Okay, I was trying to add the DAE file wrong. What actually does get imported looks all messed up. Apparently the rotations for the bones or something is all wrong after import into Blender and export from Blender. The animations do work, but the bone structure is all distorted. So there is a some incompatibility between bones from MAX collada export and blender export. To compound I don't see any options on the blender import or export for collada. So there is really no path to correcting this at this time that I can see.

I will bite the bullet and create my own bone structure and animate. Maybe this thread will help someone from taking too much time trying to get the soldier dae to work with blender. That is too bad as it would have saved some time.

Now I did create a simple Python program that reads in a file and spits out a pretty formatted XML structure. This allowed me to walk through the XML to try and determine what is actually going on. I did learn a lot about the collada format that way. If anyone wants this program:

from lxml import etree

file1 = "dae/soldier_rigged.dae"
file2 = "dae/soldier_rigged2.dae"

def main():
    fp1 = open(file1)
    tree1 = etree.parse(fp1)
    fp1.close()
    fp2 = open(file2)
    tree2 = etree.parse(fp2)
    fp2.close()

    print "converting 1"
    #print(etree.tostring(tree1, pretty_print=True))
    fp3 = open("dae/pp_soldier_rigged.dae","w")
    fp3.write(etree.tostring(tree1, pretty_print=True))
    fp3.close()
    print "converting 2"
    #print(etree.tostring(tree2, pretty_print=True))
    fp4 = open("dae/pp_soldier_rigged2.dae","w")
    fp4.write(etree.tostring(tree2, pretty_print=True))
    fp4.close()

    print "done converting"

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

This is written for Python 2.7 and uses the lxml Python library. It actually converts two files so you can edit it for your needs. I may develop more tools like this as I go. I was thinking about an XML explorer type app as I use XML a lot in my work.