headus 3D tools

[WedgeBob]

I know that Blender might be the laughing stock of the 3D modeling world, and I know that it already has a powerful UV utility built into it...but at the same time, I think that UVLayout might be 10x easier than the built-in UV utility in Blender...so that leads to mind the question... Would there, by any chance, be an official plugin designed for the Blender community for UVLayout at all? Considering that Blender is open-source, I'd have to think that plugins shouldn't be that difficult to add in, but there should always be a need for an official plugin for Blender rather than going through all the hard work trying to tailor Blender's code or interface (huge headache to do this) to make the plugins work.

[headus]

"an official plugin designed for the Blender community"

It turns out that there is no such thing as an "official plugin", not even for Maya or Max or any of the other apps. What you see here in the Plugins forum are all contributed by users.

headus is a small company so we don't even attempt to support all the different packages out there, but the plugin interface is documented so you can develop the plugins yourself. Its designed to be fairly easy too ... its just reading and writing files, there's no pipes or shared memory needed.

Phil

[WedgeBob]

Ah okay...thanks for this. I'll certainly see if there is any documentation with the dongle when it comes to using this as a plugin for Blender... I'll also check in with Blendernation.org to see if there are any others there that have used UVLayout as opposed to the built-in utility. Thanks.

[headus]

It looks like Blender uses python scripts to add plugins ...

http://www.blender.org/education-help/python/

... and there's an OBJ export/import one here ...

http://jmsoler.free.fr/util/blenderfile/py/obj_io_modif232b.py

... that you might be able to turn into a UVLayout plugin. If it was me, that exactly where I'd be starting from ... take that script and add the bit to run UVLayout in plugin mode, and the filenames and import/export options can be pre-defined, so the script's GUI can be trimmed quite a bit.

Phil

[WedgeBob]

That might work...although the documentation you linked to goes back to 2.3x, which is quite old. For 64-bit 2.60a, that might be somewhat different, we'll see... Thanks for the heads up on this, and I'll see what happens.