Blenvy

[dawn shell]

ah, found it

I see it was just renamed 🙂

Installed it, got no errors, but the N menu seems to be incomplete

Let's close and restart

Aaand Blenvy is gone

ah, it was disabled

cannot enable

that concludes my testing 🎉

Using blenvy from the current blenvy branch

And Blender 4.2.0

[steel vortex]

I'm using this hook to add input actions with Leafwing Input Manager but getting a crash inside blenvy thread 'main' panicked at ~/.cargo/git/checkouts/blenvy-b36e3bfafcd31d12/c4d8e02/crates/blenvy/src/blueprints/copy_components.rs:73:60

#[derive(Reflect)]
#[reflect(Component)]
struct Player;
impl Component for Player {
    const STORAGE_TYPE: StorageType = StorageType::Table;

    fn register_component_hooks(hooks: &mut ComponentHooks) {
        hooks.on_add(|mut world, entity, _| {
            world
                .commands()
                .entity(entity)
                .insert(InputManagerBundle::with_map(
                    PlayerAction::default_input_map(),
                ));
        });
    }
}

Is this the wrong way to go about something like this?

I'm wondering if the issue is
A: because the blueprint is still being constructed while this happens and blenvy doesn't like that
B: InputMap doesn't have a #[reflect(Component)] (should it? I haven't really understood yet how the reflection works)
Guess I have to modify the libraries and see.

[round cove]

in this scenario you aren't sending the input map or any leafwing stuff to/from blender, its being added after you spawn a blueprint with the Player component, so that's all bevy-side afaik.

I've seen some copy warnings before but never a crash

[steel vortex]

Yeah true I just mean it looks like the hook is called before the blueprint of the world has been spawned yet. I'm getting this warning as well WARN bevy_ecs::world::command_queue: CommandQueue has un-applied commands being dropped. right before the crash.

Or "right before the crash" is maybe ambiguous. The panic happens before that, it's just the last log.

[dawn shell]

Looks legit to me. I've done the exact same thing before and that worked, although in a slightly older version of Blenvy.

[round cove]

I just tried to trigger the crash and couldn't

I'm on commit #d08c2351 right now

(from cargo tree -i blenvy)

[steel vortex]

Tried reverting to that commit and it's crashing there as well.

[steel vortex]

I looked at your PlayerAction and cannot see any obvious difference.

[dawn shell]

This error message in general means that something internal has gone Very Very Wrong and the ECS is supremely unhappy

[round cove]

did you register the type?

or could it be caused by a different type

the code in blenvy is trying to fetch data from the registry: https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/c4d8e02a9d121429da31a3fa5fa6c333afc3ea71/crates/blenvy/src/blueprints/copy_components.rs#L73

[steel vortex]

I registered both PlayerAction and InputMap<PlayerAction> (although looking through leafwing input manager it registers InputMap<A>).

It doesn't crash if I swap out with another component at insert.

Found it. It was the #[reflect(Component)] on the Player that caused it.

And that probably makes sense I guess... I'm deriving behavior reflection while implementing it as well. 🤔

(I didn't understand what #[reflect(Component)] meant until half an hour ago)

[round cove]

isn't reflect(component) required for it to show up in blender though?

pretty sure your registry.json will show Player as no longer being a component without it

[steel vortex]

Yeah have to check. It changed isComponent to false in the registry.

[round cove]

the component reflection is the data that blenvy is trying to access in the above source link

[steel vortex]

Oh I see... Yeah now it disappeared from Blender...

[dawn shell]

My component looks like this:

#[derive(Debug, Clone, Copy, Reflect)]
#[reflect(Debug, Component)]
pub struct Player;

so I don't think that should be it.

Could you try adding the other derives I have that you're missing?

[round cove]

I have components without Clone/Copy that this approach is working with, so I don't think its that

[dawn shell]

It cannot be the Debug, right? right???

[steel vortex]

Still crashing with those.

[round cove]

I removed Debug from mine earlier to check lol

definitely at the "wtf, maybe its this set of characters" debugging level

I'd start putting in some extra logs when its fetching the component reflection data at this point

[steel vortex]

But it's the PlayerAction more like causing the issues I think because when I printed in blenvy it was the InputMap<PlayerAction> showing up as None. And it's not a Component. Should it be? I added the reflects on PlayerAction just in case but it didn't help.

Currently looking like this

#[derive(PartialEq, Eq, Hash, Clone, Copy, Debug, Reflect)]
enum PlayerAction {
    Move,
    Jump,
}

Tried this as well

#[derive(PartialEq, Eq, Hash, Clone, Copy, Debug, Reflect, Component)]
#[reflect(Component)]
enum PlayerAction {
    Move,
    Jump,
}

[dawn shell]

Where's your ActionLike?

[steel vortex]

impl Actionlike for PlayerAction {
    fn input_control_kind(&self) -> InputControlKind {
        match self {
            PlayerAction::Move => InputControlKind::DualAxis,
            PlayerAction::Jump => InputControlKind::Button,
        }
    }
}

[dawn shell]

Ah, alright

[steel vortex]

I tried just deriving that one as well.

[dawn shell]

This is some spooky stuff we're getting into 👀

[steel vortex]

I tried every permutation I could think of about an hour ago 😅

[round cove]

have you enabled the debug level logging yet?

there's a number of debug-level logs right before the blenvy line that panics

you'll probably want to filter it to exclude wgpu and such

something like

RUST_LOG=none,blenvy=debug

[steel vortex]

It's not giving me anything more.

There doesn't seem to be that many debug! in blenvy.

Ok there were some really long ones above

DEBUG blenvy::blueprints::copy_components: cloning: component: "leafwing_input_manager::action_state::ActionState<squash_the_creeps::PlayerAction>" TypeId(0x7245a2970c27aa0a8018f94f98411672)

This got too long for discord but it's dbg! for the InputData component that is failing. Not sure if it's useful.

[round cove]

that looks cut off, which debug log is that?

assuming its https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/c4d8e02a9d121429da31a3fa5fa6c333afc3ea71/crates/blenvy/src/blueprints/copy_components.rs#L48

if its too long for discord, throw it in a gist or similar

ah shoot I was on the wrong branch to link to that

luckily it doesn't look like it changed all that much -- https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/c4d8e02a9d121429da31a3fa5fa6c333afc3ea71/crates/blenvy/src/blueprints/copy_components.rs#L48

[steel vortex]

No it's not cut off. I just added a dbg! to https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/blenvy/crates/blenvy/src/blueprints/copy_components.rs#L72 for the failing component.

[round cove]

oh gotcha, so you don't actually see any of the debug logs

[steel vortex]

I see them as well but some of them are huge. I can post them in another text file. Just a sec.

[round cove]

the docs say that .data should only fail if the "no such value exists"

[round cove]

I have a hunch, gonna try it out in my project

[round cove]

I am unable to make it crash

what is the Player component attached to in your scene?

is it on a blueprint that is then instanced into the scene?

aha!

that is the way to make it crash

[round cove]

workaround is to place the Player component on the instance, not the blueprint for now

[brazen ermine]

Quick question, if my game doesn't have a physical "Player" its just a camera that moves through the sky should i just spawn it in code and not bother with adding it with Blenvy

[round cove]

its up to you I think. I could see valid reasons for both

my game using blenvy currently uses a code-spawned camera and it works fine that way

but I could imagine if I needed many fixed perspectives or something like that that I would want to set them up in blender

[brazen ermine]

Yeah, i can't really see a reason i'd need it in blender, its a City-Builder type game that may eventually spin-off into a seperate RTS game.. the camera just needs to move from edge to edge and have a x/y limit and maybe simple rotation.

[dawn shell]

Could you create an issue for this scenario?

[round cove]

yeah, I modified blenvy and it seems to be working, but it's not a solution I understand. I asked for some context in #1034547742262951966 -- #1034547742262951966 message

[dawn shell]

FWIW I find it very useful to get idea of how the game will look by going into the camera view in Blender with numpad 0. Gives you a good idea of scale and such

[round cove]

If I just filter out any components that don't have .data, the relevant components still show up anyway

so I'm not even sure that we'd need the data because this would be already handled by the component hook adding the components

[dawn shell]

Beware that the camera in Blender has a different FOV than in Bevy, you need to change it in Blender.

[round cove]

I think blenvy is "instantiating" the blueprint somehow, which results in the components being applied via the hook, which then attempts to copy the component info for all components on the entity, which can't be done because there's no .data, but if you just skip that then the hook adds the needed components anyway

is blenvy using a separate world for spawning blueprints and then copying them over?

[round cove]

what are we calling blenvy marker component hooks?

I guess "blenvy marker component with hooks" isn't bad.

[round cove]

filed. https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/issues/221

tldr it feels like there are two points that can customize the active component set for an entity: when loading the blueprint and when instantiating it. Right now component hooks run at both times, but it may be worth adding a BlueprintInstantiated observer event to only customize the instantiation phase component set.

[ebon zealot]

Holy moly ! Thanks for the investigation @round cove , @dawn shell , @steel vortex I will have to re-read that multiple times & dive back into the copy component logic to make sense of it all , but you did an amazing job at finding the source of the issue !

[rich helm]

Re our discussion yesterday: I was able to override components on linked blueprints just fine. Yesterday I tried to add the components onto the linked sub-collection itself, but today I added it onto the parent and everything worked OK. Thanks for the help!

[ebon zealot]

Thanks for trying it out !
So I tested it again after seeing your results and it now also fails on my end because ...I closed blender and restarted it again 😄 so the bad news is , Blender 4.2 does not seem to clean up things correctly, and it would indeed be a good idea to tell users to restart Blender after installing the add-on ...sigh
In the mean time I will be working on this specific issue (4.2 + manifest)

[ebon zealot]

All of my game prototypes so far have been top down/ semi isometric, but I still used Blender's camera for convenience : the camera just gets changed/ manipulated on the Bevy side after it has spawned (for example adding "follow the player at distance x")

[round cove]

in this case, it doesn't look like blenvy will have to update anything. The leafwing components were missing reflect(Component)

[dawn shell]

I suppose Blenvy could maybe have some diagnostics with nice error messages for it?

[round cove]

it does have the panic, so we could just change the message

I'll write a PR for that at least

I closed the investigation issue, since blenvy doesn't have to do anything right now, but it may be useful to consider that there could be an observer event to separate instantiation from loading if its ever needed

I wonder if the loaded blueprint would get added to a spatial index, for example, when using hooks

thread 'main' panicked at /Users/chris/github/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/crates/blenvy/src/blueprints/copy_components.rs:78:29:
type "leafwing_input_manager::action_state::ActionState<wash_cycle::leafwing_test::PlayerAction>"'s ReflectComponent data was not found in the type registry, this could be because the type is missing a #[reflect(Component)]

[dawn shell]

Yeah that's perfect 🙂

[dawn shell]

Did that get resolves on LWIM's side?

[round cove]

I have a PR up that looks like it'll get merged and included in the next point release

blenvy pr: https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/pull/222

[round cove]

https://github.com/Leafwing-Studios/leafwing-input-manager/pull/586 is the leafwing pr

[dawn shell]

thanks a bunch 😄

[steel vortex]

I'm still getting the issues as mentioned here: #1034547742262951966 message

[round cove]

after doing what?

[steel vortex]

What that PR does except for reflecting on Resource which I assume is not needed for this to work?

[round cove]

you locally modified the leafwing-input-manager code to reflect Component and it didn't work? or you reflected your own code's types?

[steel vortex]

I modified LWIM. I also reflected everything I could in my local project.

Oh wait nevermind. It's crashing on something else now. I just saw it crashing and didn't even look at the message. That part seems to work fine then.

[pulsar whale]

Hey all, I'm trying to follow the quickstart guide and the add-on menu seems to be a bit weird for me

Clicking most of the icons doesn't seem to change anything for me

[dawn shell]

Can you try closing and restarting Blender?

[pulsar whale]

Tried a couple times, no dice 😿

[dawn shell]

Are you using Blender 4.2 on English?

[pulsar whale]

Ope, I'm on 4.0.2, let me update

[dawn shell]

Only 4.1 and 4.2 are reported to work. 4.2 is more stable, in my experience.

[steel vortex]

What does that mean exactly? Does that mean whatever I'm setting in Blender is not correct in Bevy world? My FOV does not look like I expect it in game but I'm not sure if the difference is between Blender and Bevy or if Bevy/Blender handles FOV differently than Godot where I'm porting a game from.

[dawn shell]

Sec, I'll show you a screenshot

@ebon zealot, correct if what I'm about to write is outdated

But AFAIK, Blenvy does not set your Bevy camera's FOV at all, so you'll have to manually set it if you want it to match Blender

However

there values are not really useful for that

So first, you change the Lens Unit to "Field of View"

Then set that to match your angle in Bevy

[steel vortex]

Do you know what the default FOV is in Bevy on the top of your head?

[dawn shell]

Note that Bevy uses radians and blender degrees

[dawn shell]

No, but I can look it up

Here we go: https://docs.rs/bevy_render/0.14.1/src/bevy_render/camera/projection.rs.html#222

Which makes it 180 / 4 = 45, which is pretty low

Now, second caveat, and this one is not documented anywhere AFAIK

[steel vortex]

Yeah weird that it looks different then when it should be 40 but it's way too zoomed in from the same distance.

[dawn shell]

this setting here does not correspond to Bevy

Set it to Vertical!

I think the default height is correct, but don't quote me on that

[dawn shell]

(Might also be Horizontal in case I misremembered. One thing that is certain is that Blender's default at least used to be wrong)

let me experiment real quick

Yeah, my memory was correct

this setup will match Bevy's default

Blender (the orange rectangle is the camera)

Bevy

Ignore the fact that the physics objects fell down 😄

[dawn shell]

I should probably put that in the quickstart

[steel vortex]

Ok now I see what's going on. When I switch to vertical the FOV jumps to a lower value. So putting it back to 40 after the switch looks more reasonable.

[dawn shell]

It should look identical to Bevy now

If not, I made a mistake somewhere

(If you've set your FOV in Bevy to 40. The default is 45)

[dawn shell]

Blender's default settings for the camera are real whacky imo

[dawn shell]

Added an issue so I don't forget: https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/issues/223

[rich helm]

The camera FOV and all the lighting ”strengths” in Blender sure are confusing when trying to match Bevy 😄

[dawn shell]

Yeah, trying to match the ambient light was so annoying I had to give up. According to Google'd filament, Blender's background shader should be the same as Bevy's ambient light, but it is clearly not

I upstreamed my experiments to make the ambient color somewhat match Blender, but it’s still obviously not the same

[dawn shell]

Here's the issue in case someone else wants to try: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/12280

[steel vortex]

Isn't the registry.json file supposed to update every time I add a component and do cargo run?

[dawn shell]

if you do app.register_type::<Foo>(); with it, then yes

[grim lance]

...can I also ask questions about the codebase here? 😅

[dawn shell]

Pretty sure, but probably no one but @ebon zealot will be able to answer 😄

[steel vortex]

Right, register_type is the bane of my existence. Always forget it. :p

[grim lance]

first of all, python is, in my eyes, objectivelybad

[dawn shell]

I wish there was a cross-platform way of registering everything automatically

[ebon zealot]

Yes 🙂 (btw great set of issues on github !)

[grim lance]

There is a nested check for fields but it's always set on True?

[dawn shell]

I think that is fairly uncontroversial in these circles 😄

[ebon zealot]

Hmm , it feels like it would be a good match for another "BlenderSettingToBevy" component to have matching FOVs ?

[dawn shell]

Agreed

With the caveat that Blender's default are, in my humble opinion, completely bonkers

[grim lance]

@ebon zealot ||no, I havent edited this in, this is here from the original message||
and how does this propertyGroup stuff work?
I have a bool in process_components that is true, checked it via print statements, how else of course. I also store it in the dict down below.
but when I get that bool in draw_propertyGroup, it is always false... is there any intermediate step that I am not seeing?

also, with that dict, does that mean that having a field named with_enum bricks the system?

[ebon zealot]

Same 😄 lost 45 minutes the other day wondering why something was not working on the Blender side until I realised "doh', not registered"

[dawn shell]

So a user innocently starting a Bevy app that uses a camera placed in Blender may be confused which everything is so zoomed in.

[dawn shell]

Probably worth it, though

Or maybe it should be an opt-in?

Idk

[ebon zealot]

All the "try to match Blender stuff" is already opt in so it would fit

[dawn shell]

Wait, it is? 👀

TIL

Aaah, the "export scene settings" stuff, right?

[ebon zealot]

Not sure what you mean by a "bool in process components" ? What is it assigned to ?

[ebon zealot]

I honestly do not remember of the top of my head, the python code is convoluted to say the least (thank you Blender), so there might still be remains of a previous versions (that part changed a LOT recently) , it is pre alpha for a reason 😄

[grim lance]

so my plan is to try relations, e.g. for an Entity field, have the option to either still specify an integer, or drop in a reference, and then somehow resolve that reference when loading the gltf.

I now check for is_entity = long_name == "bevy_ecs::entity::Entity" and put that in the dict, but getting getattr(propertyGroup, "is_entity") will never get me true

[ebon zealot]

Exactly ! Thinking of renaming that to something more clear like "try to match the Blender look as much as possible"

[grim lance]

rust -> wasm -> python should be a thing

actually, now I wanna know if i can write rust addons for blender

[ebon zealot]

by "the dict" , which one do you mean ?

[dawn shell]

I was considering removing the ambient light stuff from there

[grim lance]

https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/blenvy/tools/blenvy/add_ons/bevy_components/propGroups/process_component.py#L78

[ebon zealot]

Why ? It at least give a good enough approximation for now 🙂

[dawn shell]

My issue is that it never quite matches Blender.
In my own projects, I want the lighting to go for a very specific feeling / vibe that can get usually gets lost in that approximation.
So I noticed that I preferred to disable the approximation and manually tweak AmbientLight until I hit the right mood.

Which is a bit worrying, given that I added that feature in the first place

For example, in Crazy Bike, I wanted to have a 14:00 sunny day, blue sky kind of mood

but setting that in Blender and exporting it results in something either too dark or too bright in Bevy

[ebon zealot]

@grim lance suggested moving the registry.json file out of assets into art which ... I find makes a lot of sense, as it is only used at dev time as far as I recall ?

[dawn shell]

I'm interested in your thoughts here though

Of course, we could add a toggle for each "match Blender" option, but I imagine setting that up would be a bit annoying

[ebon zealot]

I 100% agree with you on the "vibe part" , I remember a few months ago that I believed I found the "missing link" to have something that matches much closer (based on your work), and ... I got totally sidetracked & forgot about it 😆
Tweaking the values in Bevy is tedious (even more so without an editor), so even if it is not a 100% match I find it better than nothing.

[dawn shell]

My investigations here really lead me to belief that either Bevy or Blender is not doing what they are documented to do

[dawn shell]

Really? I just used bevy_inspector_egui and moved the color picker around, then wrote down the value.

[ebon zealot]

Yeah , I am all for fewer options, but perhaps this is one case where it makes sense ? (at least until we are able to really match things)

[ebon zealot]

I found it annoying to have to do it for every single project, every single time I wanted to change the mood tbh 😄

[dawn shell]

that's fair

[ebon zealot]

could you please share the code where you are setting it, and the part where you are trying to access it please ? 🙂

[dawn shell]

Yeah, I'd also like fewer options, but here I'd love to opt-out of that one in particular but opt-in with the others, as the code to do so manually is quite annoying (You have to wait until Blenvy inserts the color resources and then override them again. Simply initializing your color on a screen transition as you would normally won't work).

[ebon zealot]

There is the (bad) option of eyeballing it, but just to be sure: your issue is only with ambient, not with the rest of the light colors ?

[dawn shell]

exactly

At least, as far as I could tell

If the rest of the lights are wrong, the ambient is at least more obviously wrong

[dawn shell]

But I've found the match to be quite good so far

(except for the shadows)

[ebon zealot]

Ok, in that case, give me a bit of time, I think I should be able to trace down what I found a few months ago, (I tend to use very strong colors, so I should be able to find it again)

[dawn shell]

That would be great, but it's also not a high priority, so feel free to take your time 🙂

[grim lance]

just create a registry with AStruct(Entity) and add it, it should be empty instead of showing the number selector, that's all I want 😄

[dawn shell]

I generally struggle with making Bevy's shadows look neat, so I don't think this is Blenvy's fault.

[ebon zealot]

Color wise , light/dark, or quality ?

[dawn shell]

Quality

The shadow cascade settings are still a bit of a mystery to me

[ebon zealot]

Thanks for sharing ! It seems like it should work at a glance, I'll try it out locally and figure it out

[ebon zealot]

Ah yes 😄 That is why I tend to crank the resolution WAAY high (4096)

[ebon zealot]

Unrelated to the other issues, but would love to hear your opinion on this @dawn shell & @round cove if you do not mind 🙂

[dawn shell]

For the jam, I just didn't bother at all and simply accepted the shitty quality 😄

[dawn shell]

that kinda makes sense, yeah

[ebon zealot]

I am one of the people who does NOT like soft shadows , so there is that 😄

[ebon zealot]

hahaha 😄 well I did not even notice it at all ! so it might be "creator's obsession with details" (I know the feeling :D)

[dawn shell]

The movement in the game is so frantic that many small things are extremely hard to notice.
On one hand, the issues with the character models and the shadows are not noticeable at all
On the other hand, my little environmental details I carefully placed are not noticeable either 😄
For instance, I bet most players did not notice that there are quite a few posters on the walls in alleyways

[ebon zealot]

I think I'll add this one to the release too : https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/issues/226
I am BAD at anything animation related (I do not understand most of it) , but separating animations for reuse, makes WAY more sense than the current implementation

[round cove]

I wouldn't mind the registry file moving. It gets read in by blenvy but I don't really know exactly when. if it truly has no runtime usage then yeah we can move it. Does everyone actually have an art directory?

[ebon zealot]

Thanks for the feedback ! The issue with the "art" directory is exactly the only reason I am hesitating a bit

[round cove]

I guess if its dev-time only I shouldn't be comitting it either

[ebon zealot]

😄 I did not notice the posters indeed
Your game is fun, that is way more important imho 🙂

[dawn shell]

For my personal stuff, I only commit the .blend file (no .glbs or such). For collab, I commit everything in case people don't understand the Blenvy stuff.

[ebon zealot]

hmm that is a good point as well !

[dawn shell]

Would it be bad to just create that dir if it does not exist?

[round cove]

only if its going to be a requirement to use blenvy

[dawn shell]

Be like "Blenvy expects .blend files to be in the art dir." and allow configuring it in the future if people need it and you have time

[round cove]

feels weird to force a directory for .blend when you can configure locations anyway

git isn't great at large assets, so what if you do some alternative storage for art assets

[dawn shell]

Wouldn't other storages also allow placing stuff in whatever folder you like?

[round cove]

other storages are flexible so force them to be art/?

[dawn shell]

Idk 🤷‍♂️

[round cove]

seems like unnecessary restriction

[dawn shell]

I mean, from a point of view where configuration is free, totally

But from the point of view where that means dealing with things like "where can the registry go" and such, it's worth questioning if that is something Blenvy needs for an alpha

Imo it's better to start simple and then expand configuration options

Often you find a simpler solution along the way

[round cove]

its already configurable? so is no work to leave it the way it is right?

[dawn shell]

I guess then we put registry.json into art by default and allow overriding it in the Plugin struct?

[round cove]

for registry.json, it probably belongs in target/ anyway

if its going to be moved

[dawn shell]

You mean directly in target/registry.json?

[round cove]

anywhere in target/. target/blenvy/registry.json would work too

if we're saying its a dev-time-only build artifact is my thought process

[dawn shell]

That's fair, but you can override cargo's output dir

[round cove]

yeah, and that's available via an env var right?

[dawn shell]

No clue actually

[round cove]

it is in build scripts at least

[dawn shell]

Ah, true

[dawn shell]

I like that idea

Kinda fits, because a user doesn't even need to see that file in their working environment

[ebon zealot]

Is there any case where it might NOT be available ? want to avoid any footguns on the Blender side

[ebon zealot]

Hmm in that case it might even make sense to remove the option to choose the location on the Blender side ?

[dawn shell]

target does not need to exist

[dawn shell]

I can output my builds to deployment if I want

[round cove]

Blender might not be able to find it automatically, same as today I would imagine

[dawn shell]

So if Blenvy on Bevy's side exports it to the output dir, Blender needs to be told its location

Secret option: just create a .blenvy dir that contains files managed by blenvy that the user shouldn't manually touch

[round cove]

I think if you're configuring the location of target/ you can be expected to configure the location of target/ for blenvy right?

[dawn shell]

totally agree

Just saying that that configuration needs to be present on the Blender side as well

[round cove]

(I'm not against .blenvy either, but the js ecosytem has so many root-level dotfiles)

[dawn shell]

yeah that is horrible, I agree

[ebon zealot]

meh , I was hoping for a solution to nuke some more options 😁

[ebon zealot]

oh right, the automatic generation of the assets folder was removed a while back ?

[dawn shell]

I believe so, yes

The more I think about it, the more I like @round cove's idea of using the target (or whatever output) dir

[steel vortex]

Is there any guide to setup bevy_rapier3d similar to https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/blenvy/docs/avian/readme.md ? I'm just trying to find how I can add the colliders on the Blender side.

[dawn shell]

#general message

[dawn shell]

Maybe for context: Avian had the same (lack of) ergonomics in this regard as rapier, so I added ColliderConstructor in a PR to it in order to use colliders more easily in Blenvy, haha

If you feel like it, I'm sure @agile bear would appreciate upstreaming something like that type in bevy_rapier 🙂

[steel vortex]

Yeah I might try my hand at that tomorrow then. I just actually wanted rapier instead for the character controller and I only need the sphere and cube shapes currently. Looking at the code it looks somewhat straightforward but I'll start with the simple shapes first and see how far I get.

[final aspen]

@ebon zealot just upgraded to Blenvy and just wanted to say nice work. it works amazingly

[grim lance]

hrmm... that could be a reason why I hadn't had success yesterday.... did the ID change somehow?

now the question.... which one is which? :p

good news: I now use the correct blender addon
bad news: still doesn't work :c

[dawn shell]

What was your issue again?

[grim lance]

this patch file, tried to replace the number picker with something different for bevy_ecs::entity::Entity

but the getattr("is_entity") is always false, even when the one I put in the dict is true for one entity

[steel vortex]

Haven't been able to get this to work since Collider is not reflected in bevy_rapier and that depends on SharedShape inside parry which obviously is not reflected. Is a newtype around SharedShape with manual impl of Reflect (and TypePath) needed in this situation? Seems you cannot put #[reflect(Component)] unless you derive the Reflect trait? Is there some good reference to see anywhere to see how this is generally done?

[hollow dove]

That's exactly what the ColliderConstructor component in Avian is for; it's essentially a reflectable enum that describes what the Collider should look like and how it should be built, without storing the actual SharedShape from Parry. This gets around Collider not being directly reflectable.

[steel vortex]

Oh right yeah. The problem is that copy_components in blenvy yells at me when it tries to copy the shape at some point. I've looked at how ColliderConstructor is done in Avian and it seems to create colliders once it finds ColliderConstructor components in Update. I tried to do it with a hook instead. Maybe that's causing the difference here then. I don't see explicitly how avian gets around this problem with blenvy so that's why I got confused about the Collider reflection.

Ok yeah it doesn't complain anymore if I do it in Update instead.

(One thing I noticed before with Avian is that dropping a box straight down causes it to almost topple over. Now I can see with Rapier that it just drops straight down as I imagine is more physically accurate. I'm sure you're already aware of this but just wanted to mention it since it was pretty apparent right away that something was off.)

(Also rapier objects seem to become twice the size with the same params, which I guess would be slightly annoying for users switching back and forth between the two. No my bad, it was just the cuboid API using half extents in rapier.)

[hollow dove]

Yeah Rapier/Parry is the outlier here, Avian's colliders match Bevy's shape constructors while Rapier's don't

[grim lance]

Do they? I had to use double the radius for a sphere IIRC

[hollow dove]

(This can be fixed by increasing the number of restitution iterations in SolverConfig. The current default is 1, so the bounce isn't split as evenly between the contact points. But that's getting off-topic for Blenvy)

[hollow dove]

Collider::sphere takes a radius in both Avian and Rapier, just like Bevy's Sphere::new. So that should match everywhere

*or Rapier has Collider::ball which is also different from Bevy

[hollow dove]

I would imagine that an on_add hook should work for primitive shapes, but for the variants that generate colliders from Bevy meshes it doesn't work, because it needs to wait for the mesh to be available. Not sure what the Blenvy error is about though

[dawn shell]

@ebon zealot that sounds like a bug. I'd like to use a hook for ColliderConstructor as well if possible. ah, Jondolf is right, we need to wait until the mesh is loaded, so a hook wouldn’t work. Still, these errors seem fishy to me.

[dawn shell]

Oh, I remember. No idea how to help thought 😅

[brazen ermine]

i'm going to assume this to be a blenvy specific issue, if i use cargo run the game will launch just fine, if however i directly launch the game executable from the debug target it will fail to find the World file becaused its looking for it in ../target/debug/assets/level/World.gllb and clearly it isn't there am i expect to manually copy it over and if so that presents a interation challenge because it means everytime i build the game the assets could chance and need to be copied

[dawn shell]

That is the case for Bevy in general. You can use a symlink for dev workflows.

[brazen ermine]

😆 😆 i was just about to say, i worked around it with a symlink but yeah i wasn't aware if it was expected functionality or not

[grim lance]

yeah np, I hope kaosat can help me out when he has time to take a look at it

[ebon zealot]

Haven't forgotten 🙂 Will get back to you asap

[steel vortex]

This error was for a primitive shape though. I'm not waiting on a mesh. I guess the worrisome part is if it is due to some race condition.

[dawn shell]

I know, I know. I'm saying that fixing this wouldn’t change anything for Avian 🙂 But yes, that definitely looks like a bug!

[steel vortex]

What's interesting also is that the colliders didn't work when I got the warning but adding a KinematicCharacterController in a hook and getting the same warning, that controller seems to work. The hooks are for two different components (Player hook works but "MyColliderConstructor" doesn't). Something strange seems to be going on.

2024-08-11T18:57:17.744200Z  WARN blenvy::blueprints::copy_components: cannot clone component: component: "bevy_rapier3d::control::character_controller::KinematicCharacterController" is not registered
2024-08-11T18:57:17.744521Z  WARN blenvy::blueprints::copy_components: cannot clone component: component: "bevy_rapier3d::geometry::collider::Collider" is not registered

Maybe it has something to do with the ordering of how things are added with regards to rigid body and collider? I'm guessing you always have to add the rigid body first (or the other way around)? So the hypothesis might be that collider was added to an object first which is not allowed.

What is actually not working in the MyCollisionConstructor case is that the rigid body isn't moving and the not the collider either. So presumably it is the rigid body component that breaks.

Actually there is a slight complication because the working example has the collider on a child entity of the rigid body entity. But assuming the parent is spawned first (?) that shouldn't change what I said above.

[pulsar whale]

Hey all, I'm just now getting Blenvy set up in a project (the improvements are all great btw) and I had a question about some components used in the quickstart

Just wondering what HideUntilReady and GameWorldTag actually do

My assumption is that HideUntilReady is just waiting until the scene has loaded to toggle visibility, but I'm a bit lost on GameWorldTag

[dawn shell]

That is correct. I myself don't know exactly what GameWorldTag does and simply copied it from @ebon zealot for the guide 😄 Would like to know as well. I mean, I know that it stands for the "outermost" blueprint that corresponds to your World scene in Blender, but idk what would happen if you just omitted it.

[pulsar whale]

For that reason, does it make more sense to just use the blueprint bundle for things that aren't a full world?

[dawn shell]

You should use a simple BlueprintBundle for things coming from your Library scene

[pulsar whale]

And something not related, have you guys taken a crack at building animation graphs for blueprints that contain an armature? If not I may take a crack at a PR

[ebon zealot]

It is just a helper Tag , only useful in very few cases , mostly when coupled with the AddToGameWorld
So you use GameWorldTag on your "world" , and AddToGameWorld in any entity that should be automatically added to the "world"

[dawn shell]

Pretty sure no one has done so. That sounds amazing, though 👀

[dawn shell]

By "added to the world", do you mean that it will be inserted into the hierarchy correctly?

[pulsar whale]

I wouldn't get too excited, i'm still a fledgling rust dev, but I would love to help out with such a great crate (and hopefully an upstream candidate)

[ebon zealot]

In most cases you don't even need the bundle since blenvy, 99% of the time, you can just BlueprintInfo::from_path("xxxx")

[ebon zealot]

exactly this !

[ebon zealot]

I have so little time, so much hidden features to document 😢

[pulsar whale]

I was going to default to the bundle just to make sure I don't miss a SpawnBlueprint and lose my mind debugging haha

[ebon zealot]

That is awesome ! My understanding of animation related stuff is ... bad so any help in that area would be fantastic

[ebon zealot]

hahaha yes, that is a good point 😄

[pulsar whale]

also @ebon zealot do you have github sponsor set up?

[ebon zealot]

nope , just "ko-fi" got sidetracked with Blenvy while setting github sponsor up 😄

[dawn shell]

Ping me when you have GH sponsor stuff

I just gained a sponsor recently and would like to funnel some of that to you

[ebon zealot]

Speaking of animations ... one reason why I still haven't release an actual alpha is being sidetracked (yes, there is a pattern there, mostly when I am dead tired like in the past 2 months) 😄

[ebon zealot]

The lack of reusability of animations has been bugging the hell out of me for ages . And someone mentionned this issue on Github.
(Don't get your hopes up just yet, have not tackled the Bevy side yet, but it will be based on the way materials work)

Btw does anybody know if non-armature based animations are also reusable ?

[pulsar whale]

I don't know for certain but my guess would be no

[dawn shell]

ouff, no clue

[ebon zealot]

Dang , that complicates things quite a lot if it is the case 😦

[pulsar whale]

Let me dig around and see If i can find a more concrete answer

[dawn shell]

I've never worked with non-armature animations

What are they used for?

Are they like morph targets?

[ebon zealot]

just moving objects around, like having a cube move across your level, anything really, or rotations etc

[dawn shell]

Ooooh those things

Like for making a cube follow a line?

[ebon zealot]

have not tried that specicially, but any transform (as in pos, rot, scale) can be animated

[dawn shell]

I didn't know those could be exported

I remember specifically not using them because I thought "yeah, sounds like some Blender-specific thing that's not supported anywhere else"

Good to know that is apparently not the case!

[round cove]

I've been staring at morph targets intending to figure them out for about a week, so might look into that soon

[dawn shell]

please report back if you do, I'd love to get into that as well at some point

[ebon zealot]

on that topic, Blenvy has support for both blueprint level AND instance level animation triggering (oh boy, so much boilerplate there) so you could have for example !

• a robot with various animations (jump, move, scan etc) => blueprint level animations
• you could move your robot instances A & B across the level and rotate them etc => instance level animations

[dawn shell]

The latter sounds supremely nice for cutscenes

[ebon zealot]

That was exactly the idea 😉 Requested by a user waaay back

Honestly I 100% get why Bevy has per domain (assets, animation etc) "specialists", my brain is splitting from all these specific topics

[dawn shell]

I can imagine

I can be your SME for finding bugs that don’t happen on your machine 😛

[ebon zealot]

😄 hahaha, that is pretty much already your official role, init' ? 😉

[ebon zealot]

Hi ! I took your code for a spin, but realised something: you want to display the entities/bevy_ecs::entity::Entity in a different way right ?
For testing, you likely added a special component containing an entity ?

[round cove]

||I think that enough people are downloading/trying to use it that directing them towards an alpha release is effectively already happening. so having a single crates.io/zip to point to would be helpful more than hurtful. Then bugs don't have to stream in constantly, but rather people who aren't comfortable with main-branch dev can just wait for a release too.||

spoilered because its technically a vote

[dawn shell]

||Fully agree. Also, buggy unfinished releases are what alpha prereleases are for. Just tag it 0.1.0-alpha.1 or something.||

[open steeple]

maybe 0.0.1? 😅

i think what's more important is making a video that explains how to use and what's unfinished/bugged

[dawn shell]

that gives me the impression of "this person has just reserved the crate name but didn't actually code anything"

[open steeple]

it wouldn't have a version if there was no code

[dawn shell]

I intentionally wrote the quickstart in text format in order to make it easier to update, seeing as breaking changes in Blenvy are inevitable during an alpha

[dawn shell]

I beg to differ

[open steeple]

ok fair enough

0.0.2 then

[grim lance]

Yeah, just have a Testtt(Entity). And when I print in the components loader thingy, is_entity is true one time, so the entity does get recognized correctly…

[grim lance]

For the animation, I am currently using single bone armatures, linking the bone to the object and modifying the bone in the animation. Never thought of doing that directly but I dont think it works with bevy..

Having the animations split up will be interesting.. I was planning to do an „asset chain“ where I would load the gltf, get animations by name and construct them together there. Having the possibility to load them directly makes this much easier

Oh wait you export every single armature, right? So animations are still packed together :c

[ebon zealot]

I am currently just experimenting with splitting animations/ armatures out, so not opposed to exporting each animation out , if it makes sense and mostly if it is even possible. Not sure if I could even extract them out on the Blender side. My understanding was that most people want to reuse armatures and their animations.
There is also the issue with non armature animations, which I have no idea how to handle atm 😅

[grim lance]

Non armature animations might not even work with bevy so…

[ebon zealot]

They work without any issues 🙂

[ebon zealot]

Thanks a lot 🙂

[grim lance]

Huuhhhhhhh

Either way, I am so confused with blender animations, there are like 4 editors for different things but everything feels like one timeline when you not found that special hidden button that lets you seperate clips… meh

[ebon zealot]

So I dug into your issue, and it is not trivial at all : I'll get into the details in a minute, but first : how do you want to display the Entity Id ? with a custom UI ?

[grim lance]

my idea was to have an object picker with layout.prop_search and a button next to it to toggle between manual entity and object selection mode. Later I want to store an additional attribute with the gltf node index as a link and restore the entity on spawn on the bevy side

[ebon zealot]

Ok, that sound like a good idea, in practice it will not be easy (hurray for Blender's convoluted internals)

• so the reason why you are not seeing the is_entity in the UI, is because Entity is considered a value type by Blenvy (as it is just an id), and handled differently : ie your Entity is just a field so it is displayed here
• value types are handled differently when processed: see here for example
• value types are currently essentially hardcoded for convenience see here and here

[grim lance]

prepares to read a trilogy

huh? But for it to get down there it has to recursively call draw_propertyGroup first, doesn't it?

[ebon zealot]

TLDR : to achieve at least a custom display would mean:

• removing Entities from the hardcoded values
• generating a specific propertyGroup that can use layout.prop_search
• a whole lota boilerplate 😦

[ebon zealot]

yes, but the recursion stops at value types , and the place you are seing true for is_entity during processing is at a level that gets discarded for value types

[grim lance]

but doesn't it in the end need more boilerplate when you stop at value types?

so

struct Testtt {
  lol: Entity,
}

would work?! 😭

also, the default for bool is false in rust 🤓

thanks for the links, lets see how much good I can do this 😄

funny how you change so often between presets=, and "presets":

[ebon zealot]

Sadly, same logic there. 😦

[ebon zealot]

glad if it can help a bit.
The code is horribly convoluted for two reasons:

• Blender
• Me trying to figure things out and dancing around the internals & limitations of Blender 😦

[grim lance]

no worries, I might have a hot path :0

...or not

[ebon zealot]

The whole Blender side would need YET ANOTHER overall cleanup

[grim lance]

yeah 😄

so I now can get rid of the integer, but it should already display a picker :c

[ebon zealot]

honestly not a priority at this point, I already removed 90% of things with a chainsaw, but its ...meh

[grim lance]

oh I got an error 😛 didn't even know python has those

wait... my is_entity gets triggered now? whut ._.

so... I got collapsing back... from removing the is_entity check.... that makes no sense at all

YEEEEEEEEEESSSS 🎉

thanks for your help 😄

it was trivial at the end, some cleanup made it way easier 😛

[dawn shell]

oh heck yeah, is that for entity relations?

[grim lance]

references, yes

[grim lance]

somehow gotta refer to my closet door as a rigidbody 😛

[grim lance]

why does conversions_to_prop_group exist and what does it do / is it used for?

[ebon zealot]

to convert "ron" / text representations of components to property group (values) . Used for example to generate the correct UI values from the ron values.

[grim lance]

huh? blender doesn't directly store the property groups on the objects? O.o

[ebon zealot]

"jaein" 😄 it does, but it can loose the values stored inside the property groups & revert to default (don't ask, Blender logic)

[grim lance]

"oh no, I dropped a value.. meh, it's only 12 cents" or what 😭

[ebon zealot]

also keep in mind , originally (pre Blenvy), there where just standard custom properties , with no custom UI , so I also added boilerplate to make migration easier

[grim lance]

oh..

problem is.. how do I serialize a reference to an object for a blend file? O.o

[ebon zealot]

you mean a reference to an object inside a blend file ? .... I have bad news :

• references to objects are not stable in Blender, so you need to use ....their names
• oohh but then again, names can be changed ! , so that is not reliable or requires a ton of workarounds
• perhaps objects have an immutable ID that could be used ? NOPE
  (in case that was not clear, this is an issue I hit over and over and over again ....) 😱

So I am currently still looking for a way to generate unique ids for objects (and scenes , need that there too) that do not get copied when an object is duplicated
There are a few possible solutions that I have not yet had time to try out, I am off for now but I can share the links later

I should just rename the Blender part of Blenvy to "I suffered through months of illogical design and code so you won't have to " 😄

[grim lance]

well I found a help forum post that says since 2.79 it's possible via PointerProperty, which is what I use, so no direct name. It behaves like a Pointer, but no clue what it does on the inside

actually, I'll try to rename the mesh I picked

lets see what happens

name gets updated, they are really related 😄

noice

[ebon zealot]

it comes with a lot of caveats, (It is used in a few places in Blenvy for example for selecting level/library scenes ), but it works ...until it does not

[grim lance]

so no saving of relations? :c

or should I save the name because it can't change as long as it's not open?

still, the "values sometimes get dropped" seem weird to me.. is there any article / forum thingy about this?

[ebon zealot]

you would need the name to inject it into the Gltf right ?

[grim lance]

not really

I would store 0 as the entity and add an additional prop that relates to the other gltf node...

[ebon zealot]

they can get dropped for example when you reload the registry and the propertyGroups get regenerated

[grim lance]

hmm... maybe I need to think about that for a bit longer, what about multiple entities?

[ebon zealot]

how would you relate to another gltf node ? (genuine question)

[grim lance]

can't we just.. keep the non-chaning ones?:

[ebon zealot]

there is no trivial way to detect if something has changed or not (at least to my knowledge) and that part of the code is already horribly complex

[grim lance]

know what objects relate to each other, generate the gltf and keep track of the node index of each, then iterate over all objects with relations and, query the index of the target and add that

no I have no idea if this works

[ebon zealot]

but you cannot get any information about the node index from the Blender side as it is a gltf generation artefact ?

[grim lance]

😭

[ebon zealot]

I honestly do not see how you can get this working without using either the name or some id 😦

[grim lance]

well then it will be the id 😄

so name for .blend save and id for .gltf export?

[ebon zealot]

?

[grim lance]

for conversions_to_prop_group, should I use the name of the object? but then id when exporting

[grim lance]

ok so.... I don't have any clue why it works.. but it works..

now I just need to actually make the id system export and bevy side work 😄

[pulsar whale]

it can be pretty rough, the NLA editor in particular is very finicky to work with

[ebon zealot]

Tweaking a few minor things before the release.
As part of the release I will:

• merge the Blenvy branch into main
• close a ton of tickets in the process ( a bit unorthodox for an alpha but will allow me to have a better overview of the current issues, not ones already resolved)
• tag & release the Bevy crate & the Blender add-on

[ebon zealot]

Could somebody kindly try to create a zip file of the Blender add-on from the Blenvy branch & try it out under Blender 4.2 ? Double checked a few times, but want to be 100% sure it works out of the box before releasing . Thanks !

[grim lance]

Stupid idea for post-Alpha, we could introduce bevy as a render engine.. will not be easy, because we somehow get to get all resources etc… and when there’s custom renderers whooops.. we would basically have to link to the game, add all our controls and hope that players don’t just use Camera, but Camera, With<PlayCamera> queries instead

[final aspen]

i feel like at this point we just make a bevy editor lol

[ebon zealot]

Sorry to ping all of you again, but this is the last check I need before I release the alpha 🙂

[tender oyster]

Removed previous blenvy version from blender and added latest blenvy from blenvy branch. Blender 4.2 windows 11. Reload registry and auto export works.

And don't be sorry) You did a huge amount of work singlehandedly. Thanks.

Adding/removing components also works

[dawn shell]

Will try later, not at home rn

[ebon zealot]

Awesome ! Thanks for testing it out 🙂
And thanks for the kind words 🙂

Btw now that it works correctly on 4.2 with the manifest file I can confirm, for whatever reason, Blender expects all imports to be relative 🤦‍♂️

[round cove]

Just built the zip, restarted blender, deleted/re-saved all of my generated objects, and ran successfully with the updated branch code

[dawn shell]

Everything works great on 4.2 on macOS 😄

Can confirm the "copy paste ColliderContructor fails" bug is still there, but I assume you didn't try fixing that

Contrary to what we suspected before, it seems like the target doesn't need to be an empty, as you can see from my selection

And this was what I copied

These are all old news, just used the opportunity to test out different targets to gain a bit of information on the bug 🙂

[dawn shell]

But yes, the addon itself is working splendid!

I also notice that the addon is now called Blenvy instead of blenvy in my list, which is a nice confirmation that I indeed installed the right thing 🙂

Does this mean you can publish the addon on https://extensions.blender.org/ now? 👀

[glacial terrace]

ls

[tender oyster]

What will happen when a user will try to use the newest blender blenvy plugin and older bevy blenvy library? Or vice versa. There should probably be some compatibility check implemented before the stable blenvy release (not alpha) to prevent some weird bugs or maby mentioning this in a readme is enough.

[ebon zealot]

Nope had no time for that yet, sorry 🙂

[ebon zealot]

I might try to release it on the extensions platform once the stable (not alpha etc) release is out 🙂

[ebon zealot]

I added a small mention of this in the README already that I can only guarantee for things to work when match Blender <=> Bevy versions of addon/crate are used, would get completely unmanageable otherwise 🙂

So folks, you might have noticed that the alpha is STILL not out : I found a nasty bug yesterday that could "brick" your Blenvy setup on the Blender side (not really brick it, but reseting things would be tedious until I add "reset to factory defaults"), and I have a little cherry on top feature I wanted to squeeze in , but it is almost all ready 🙂

[dawn shell]

Can we export the Blenvy addon version somewhere so that the Bevy side can verify compatibility?

[ebon zealot]

hmm, there is not "central" place, but I could add it to the meta file ?

[dawn shell]

I think that would work, yeah

Otherwise, cargo update could result in undefined behavior

[ebon zealot]

?

[dawn shell]

If only the exact same versions are guaranteed to work together, updating the Bevy side from 0.1.0 to 0.1.1 without updating the Blender addon is undefined behavior

[ebon zealot]

good point, so we need the same kind of semver validation as with crates

[dawn shell]

Imo it’s fine if you just specify that the bevy and blender version must be EXACTLY the same, semver be damned

Just need to make a user aware that they need to update their Blender version after they innocently did a cargo update and accidentally (and correctly!) updated Blenvy through that

This is very similar to how wasm-bindgen works, btw

Their crate and CLI will refuse to work unless they have the exact same version, and they always release both in perfect lockstep

[ebon zealot]

Good point ! I'll cross that bridge when we get there 🙂
I'll add an issue for this on GH

[ebon zealot]

Hmm, what could these features be ? 😲

[tender oyster]

"Start editing blueprint" on selected blueprint instance switched scene and allows more easily to edit blueprint?

[ebon zealot]

Bingo ! It was an awesome feature created by @jolly crypt in a fork of Blenvy, which I made a few QOL changes to (you can jump between the main scene & editing a blueprint and back using the same keyboard shortcut)
it also :

• if nothing is selected it will automatically a new empty Blueprint & an instance & start edit mode
• it selects the root collection of your blueprint automatically to make it even easier to place components
• it saves & resets your viewport camera when jumping between main scene & editing scene
• a lot more !

[ebon zealot]

@jolly crypt your idea and implementation were absolutely fabulous, I just had to make a few changes and streamline it, but it feels AMAZING

[tender oyster]

Nice features!!
Waiting for the alpha release, raleeeeseeeesee...😃

[ebon zealot]

Any minute now 😄 a few final checks

[dawn shell]

Woooow that's supremely cool

No more searching my giant library for the right thingy!

Can the camera save and reset trick be used for the bug where saving the file causes you to exit the numpad zero view?

[ebon zealot]

BINGO !
Oh did I mention it also automatically adds new blueprints to the first Library scene it finds and if not even creates a library scene for you ?

[ebon zealot]

oooh that is an idea !

[dawn shell]

You mean we can shave that entire scene creation stuff off the quickstart?

[ebon zealot]

I would wait a bit for that, but yes, theoretically it should be possible

So , I 'm done with the last few tweaks & testing, pushing them & releasing
Disclaimer: I am dead tired, so I might make a huge mistake somewhere, so there might be another alpha realy fast if I mess up 😄

(also , nope , not STRESSED at all to do a first release after so many months, even if it is an alpha)

Damn

[dawn shell]

Heck 😄

[ebon zealot]

publish dry run no happy !

crap, I just saw I forgot to update the quickstart to match the release too 😦

[dawn shell]

Now that the jam is over, I can try updating Crazy Bike to the released alpha on the weekend or so 👍

[dawn shell]

Ah, the git part?

The hyperlink on docs.rs is probably broken anyways since it’s local, so you can just change it on GitHub

[ebon zealot]

yep

[grim lance]

Oh that reminds me of a question I had, I currently use 4.2 for blenvy and 4.1 for normal stuff, is it safe to use blenvy in non-blenvy files and/or could there be an initial "Create/Init blenvy project" in the menu so normal blender files don't get modified in any way?

[dawn shell]

(I assume you wanted to type 4 instead of 3?)

[ebon zealot]

I am stumped on this, I added bevy_animation to the features (was missing and never caused problems ? odd) but the problems with publish are still the same

also seems coherent ?

[dawn shell]

Try cargo update?

Good thing to do before a release anyways

[ebon zealot]

good point, but does publish not go with the latest sem-ver compatible versions anyway ?

[dawn shell]

Not sure actually

I would have expected it to respect the lock file

[ebon zealot]

Interesting !

[dawn shell]

But then again, cargo install only does that when adding --locked, so 🤷‍♂️

[ebon zealot]

ok , so I stand corrected, it seems to have fixed almost all problems:

[ebon zealot]

Still odd, normally the named_animations fields depends on the bevy_animations crate/feature ?

Ok this is hilarious, found the answer in one of my own posts from last year 😄

Bingo !

[dawn shell]

Hahahaha

[ebon zealot]

@dawn shell for the quickstart, cargo add blenvy should suffice now for the alpha right ? (sorry if these questions are basic, I have to leave for a day in a few minutes 😄 )

[dawn shell]

yes 🙂

Do you wanna fix the links in the readme to be absolute while you're on it?

Otherwise I think someone clicking on quickstart will get a 404 on docs.rs

[ebon zealot]

could you point me to the right place please ?

[dawn shell]

- [quickstart guide](./docs/quickstart/readme.md)
+ [quickstart guide](https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/main/docs/quickstart/README.md)

Assuming the quickstart will land on main

Same goes for all links really

[ebon zealot]

Waaait you mean my doc links were wrong this whole time ?😅

[dawn shell]

Only the main readme.md really, the rest is IIRC not shown on docs.rs anyways

[dawn shell]

Oh, I see that you're not doing #![doc = include_str!("../../../readme.md")] or so in lib.rs

Maybe consider that for the release @ebon zealot

[ebon zealot]

Too late 😄

[dawn shell]

Otherwise your readme only lands on crates.io and not docs.rs

[dawn shell]

Eh, not too bad 🙂

congrats on the release 🎉

[ebon zealot]

The release is out !
https://crates.io/crates/blenvy
https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/releases/tag/blenvy_v0.1.0-alpha.1

[ebon zealot]

Thanks !

Release is out, and so am I , I hope I did not break things somehow, have fun !

[ebon zealot]

could you please add an issue for that 🙂

[tender oyster]

Thank you!!!
I installed alpha. It works.

[dawn shell]

https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/pull/232

@ebon zealot hold up, type registry filtering works now?

that's cool!

https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/issues/152

[ebon zealot]

Yes 🙂 has been in there a few months I think 🙂

[dawn shell]

I guess now that we have a nice search bar it's not that important anymore

[tender oyster]

Some links on the Quickstart page https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/tree/main/docs/quickstart are broken:

1. "Download blenvy.zip from the release page"
2. "Read about the Avian Physics Integration"...

Page https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/main/docs/avian/README.md also contains broken links.

Nothing critical. Alpha release.

[brazen ermine]

so i'm trying to implement a skybox from the bevy examples but its causing a problem with blenvy.

type annotations needed for blenvy::Handle<_>

[dawn shell]

The skybox shouldn't really be interacting with Blenvy at all

[brazen ermine]

based on this code

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/3d/skybox.rs

[dawn shell]

Add it to your camera from an observer on OnAdd, Camera

[brazen ermine]

i'll have to look into that because my camera goes through the smooth_bevy_cameras crates plugin which means for the moment its done in code in a specific way

[dawn shell]

pub(super) fn plugin(app: &mut App) {
  app.observe(insert_skybox);
  app.register_type::<IngameCamera>();
}

#[derive(Debug, Component, Reflect)]
#[reflect(Component)]
struct IngameCamera;

fn insert_skybox(
  trigger: Trigger<OnAdd, IngameCamera>,
  mut commands: Commands
) {
  commands
    .entity(trigger.entity())
    .insert(Skybox { 
      ... 
    });
}

Then just make sure that IngameCamera is placed on your camera, no matter if you spawn it through Blenvy or code @brazen ermine 🙂

(Note that a hook would be slightly more performant in this case, but a lot more boilerplate)

[brazen ermine]

i'll have to tinker with it the code they give in the example is a lot different and being new to rust i'm going to have to figure out how to translate that

[dawn shell]

Let me know if you have any specific questions. I just recently implemented a skybox in a project using Blenvy, so it’s very fresh in my mind 🙂

[brazen ermine]

the reason the camera is done is code is i couldn't figure out how to specify a specifc cameracontroller as provided by the bevy_smooth_cameras plugin inside blenvy

[round cove]

Is there/should there be a "blenvy component hooks" doc page?

its kind of a general bevy thing, but seems very relevant if its going to be a repeated pattern for new users

[dawn shell]

Probably, yeah

[round cove]

ok, I'll take a crack at writing one

[dawn shell]

Can you not add a marker component to your camera in Blenvy and then add all relevant things, including the smooth camera stuff, in an observer just like the one I posted above?

[brazen ermine]

.spawn(Camera3dBundle::default())
        .insert(UnrealCameraBundle::new(
            UnrealCameraController::default(),
            Vec3::new(-2.0, 5.0, 5.0),
            Vec3::new(0., 0., 0.),
            Vec3::Y,
        ));
    }

Specifically this is how i spawn the camera i want the unreal style fly camera but i couldn't figure out how to implement that inside blenvy which i would have preferred.

[dawn shell]

Add the IngameCamera component through Blenvy, then insert that unreal controller in the observer

(Along with the skybox)

[brazen ermine]

to be honest, the nomenclature might as well be greek to me, i don't really know rust yet..

at least not great

[dawn shell]

No problem 🙂 which words are an issue?

[brazen ermine]

well the observer what is that in refernece to

[dawn shell]

The insert_skybox function is an observer

It will get called when the event in its Trigger is happening

In this case, whenever the IngameCamera component is added to an entity

The idea is that you add the IngameCamera component to an object in Blender using Blenvy. Then, on the Bevy side, Blenvy will build that entity and insert an IngameCamera for you.
The observer then reacts to that happening and inserts further stuff into the entity

[brazen ermine]

so, one thing i saw was the abality to add again unsure the nomenclature but compoenents with blevy:::something here to the camera inside blenvy but i couldn't find anything that wasn't a built-in like i couldn't just create my own function and get it to call inside blenvy that i could find so i couldn't figure it out, are you saying that there is a way to do that or that there are specific funtions that it can call

?

it'd have been epic if blenvy could have indexed (parsed?) additional calls from our custom code but i don't think it does that

[dawn shell]

See the line saying app.observe(insert_skybox)? That is the way in which you register observers

This is a way for you to tell Bevy to call stuff when Blenvy is done building an object, essentially

[dawn shell]

The UI will show any component that you register via app.register_type

If you go through the Blenvy quickstart, you can see how that is done for a custom component called Player

[brazen ermine]

i see, well that clarify's it a bit, still its gonna be a lot of tinkering to figure out how to get it to work but i think in the long run it'd be better to have the camera inside blenvy and to figure out how to call observers

[dawn shell]

Yep, agreed that is the better option 😄

The code should be fairly small, I think you’ll figure it out quickly 🙂

Also, observers are a great tool to know in general!

[brazen ermine]

question

pub(super) fn plugin(app: &mut App) {
  app.observe(insert_skybox);
  app.register_type::<IngameCamera>();
}

this, first time i've seen a pub(super) where does this get called is it added in setup as a system?

[dawn shell]

https://github.com/TheBevyFlock/bevy_quickstart/blob/main/docs/design.md#plugin-organization

pub(super) fn foo means that foo is only visible to the parent module

It's a style of organizing your code into plugins, where nearly each file has its own plugin

In your case, your lib.rs or main.rs might look like this:

use bevy::prelude::*;

mod camera;
mod player;

pub fn main() -> AppExit {
  App::new()
    .add_plugins(DefaultPlugins)
    .add_plugins((camera::plugin, player::plugin))
    .run()
}

And your camera.rs contains the code I wrote above:

pub(super) fn plugin(app: &mut App) {
  app.observe(setup_camera);
  app.register_type::<IngameCamera>();
}

#[derive(Debug, Component, Reflect)]
#[reflect(Component)]
struct IngameCamera;

fn setup_camera(
  trigger: Trigger<OnAdd, IngameCamera>,
  mut commands: Commands
) {
  commands
    .entity(trigger.entity())
    .insert(
      Skybox { 
        ... 
      },
      UnrealCameraController {
        ...
      },
    );
}

[dawn shell]

For organization, you could also have a mod blenvy where you add the Blenvy plugin with its configuration

[brazen ermine]

i will eventually learn to seperate everyting into plugins i very much want to structure the project like that, but it's too much to learn at once kinda, right now everything is in main.rs

[dawn shell]

Sure, do whatever works best for you 🙂

You will notice I use pub(super) fn plugin in nearly all examples I post because it's quicker than to say "add this to wherever you register your stuff for your app"

[brazen ermine]

your way is better, it's just i've tried to create my own modules or plugins in bevy/rust before and it always failed so it's just overwhelming to try to learn that on top of learning the laanguage itself

[dawn shell]

Note that while this plugin organizational style is the one I personally like best, there are others who disagree, that's fine too. Do whatever fits your use-case best 🙂

[dawn shell]

Yeah, I agree getting started in clean Bevy architecture is frustrating without any guidance 😅
That's a big reason why I wrote that document I linked above

[brazen ermine]

I'll look through the quickstart again, i think i also kept getting mixed up which ones i was reading bevy_quickstart vs blenvy_quickstart and i think i stooped reading one w hen it wasn't finished yet😆

[dawn shell]

hehe, understandable

[brazen ermine]

A suggestion, for the quickstart, because i'm not seeing it myself and by extension, it's not obvious for a beginning (your target audience), i'd add a section about how all the modules hook back into the main.rs or the main loop as it were

[dawn shell]

Good idea, thanks!

[final aspen]

@ebon zealot amazing work on the release. have a good rest you earned it. 🚀

[open steeple]

wait, it's out? there's no post in #crates so i missed it

[ebon zealot]

Thanks a lot much appreciated ☺️

[ebon zealot]

Yet to post about it anywhere:) will do soon

[round cove]

its a sneaky alpha 😆

[grim lance]

@ebon zealot mind help me figuring out where the gltf export happens in the blender site? It's in the auto_export folder, right? but what then?

[ebon zealot]

Main function is here: https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/main/tools%2Fblenvy%2Fadd_ons%2Fauto_export%2Fcommon%2Fauto_export.py

But it really starts here : https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/blob/main/tools%2Fblenvy%2Fadd_ons%2Fauto_export%2Fcommon%2Fprepare_and_export.py

[grim lance]

thanks

other question: why copy the components from one entity to another?

on the rust side

[grim lance]

wait.. is the whole serialization of components happening in the conversions_to_prop_group function?

[ebon zealot]

In order to "merge" the components from the nested entity (as gltf files at least those from blender have an additional, useless nesting level) with the root entity (the one you actually care about as a user).
The children of the nested entity are also copied over to the root entity and finally the nested entity gets despawned.

[ebon zealot]

I honestly don't remember of the top of my head, will check tomorrow when I am at the PC

[dawn shell]

Couldn't you just despawn the useless intermediate and set the useful entity as the child of the root entity?

[ebon zealot]

nope, because as a user you expect the components to be where you placed them in Blender, not at a sub level, also it causes lots of incoherent results in queries (because your components would land on a child, not the root), also if you spawn a blueprint into an existing entity (like when spawning a level, or dynamic spawning of entities at run time), you want the components to be on the same level as the original entity. It might be hard to get it across in writing, but you are going to have to take my word for it, I tried many different versions of this, and the current one is the only one that "feels right" (regardless of implementation details)

[dawn shell]

Ooooh I see the issue

Fair enough

[iron gale]

Idk if this is helpful but I just found out this exists: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-IO/tree/main/example-addons/example_gltf_exporter_extension

[round cove]

@dawn shell do you have a shader node/texture baking workflow that you like with blenvy. Not loving the qbaker setup I have at the moment.

[dawn shell]

Nope, been quite a while since I did that, mainly because the workflow for that was too unwieldy for my taste :/

[ebon zealot]

Is that an area where I could help via Blenvy? (I have zero knowledge about baking in Blender so a link would be very much appreciated ☺️)

[round cove]

theoretically yes, but it would increase scope a decent amount and there's already a number of baking plugins for blender.

the tldr; basics explanation is "have complicated/heavy-to-compute thing, need simpler thing", so for a shader you'd be writing the material output, or a specific node's output, to an image which you can then use. for example, baking the base color or displacement to a texture, and then using that texture in Bevy for the base color or parallax depth.

You can also bake a whole bunch of other stuff. mesh detail, shaders, physics sims, etc. Generally speaking its the act of "pre-compute and store information to a texture".

I'm using QuickBaker at the moment for baking and the workflow is... ok. it works for the most part

You can also bake global illumination lightmaps and such, so its a pretty wide topic and could potentially get very big in scope: https://github.com/Naxela/The_Lightmapper

[grim lance]

ok yeah, it is 😄 that makes stuff much more interesting :>

Current thoughts are:
I don't want to reference entities via their names, because that's bulky and feels unsafe, can't I just use IDs, they should be safer.
Well... every object has unique names, and they should only be able to change after the relations are already resolved..
And when having multiple instances of a collection, IDs won't be any safer than names...

[brazen ermine]

@dawn shell I've been working on trying to convert my code to follow your quickstart. can you point me torwards why or more preceicecely where i'm suppose to call this compoenent its added to the camera in Blenvy but, its not being called.

[dawn shell]

Wherever you are adding your systems to your app, also do app.observe(setup_camera) 🙂

[brazen ermine]

and that should be done on the module level in the pub fn plugin or on the main level in App

?

sorry i'm still wraping my head around the whole module strcture in Bevy/Rust

[dawn shell]

If you are using the organization proposed here, that would be:

// camera.rs
use bevy::prelude::*;

pub(super) fn plugin(app: &mut App) {
  app.observe(setup_camera);
}

fn setup_camera(...) {
  // ...
}

Does that help?

[dawn shell]

Try to have about one plugin per file, where that plugin adds all of the things of that file to the app

There are exceptions of course, but that is the general rule of thumb

(But opinions vary! Not everyone uses that style)

[round cove]

a global observer can be added to any app

[dawn shell]

Yep, from a technical perspective it does not matter at all where you do this @brazen ermine. This is a purely stylistic choice.

Use whatever convention you personally think is best in that regard 🙂

If you see me throwing around pub(super) fn plugin in any of my example snippets, that is just what I personally like 😄

[brazen ermine]

i gotcha, well its tough to ask someone hey so i need you to sorta of abstract your guide for me so that i can take the modular parts but use it in my style. especially when your learning, you kinda have to follow the guide to the letter to get anything useful from it.. i'll decide how much l like the style later i guess.. but i knew i needed to seperate things into modules now..

And, nonetheless, i got it to work, i do however, put my camera on the player module, because, well technically the player itself is really just a camera in this game..

[dawn shell]

That makes perfect sense for your use-case 👍

[brazen ermine]

I do have a question, the way i added IngameCamera to the camera inside Blenvy, is that the generally accecpted method to add logic to a entity that is pre-placed inside the scene? and if so is there any cost/overhead to doing it like that with a observer?

[round cove]

@dawn shell might have additional opinions, but I think the "ideal" situation is to put the UnrealCameraController on the object in blender and skip the observer entirely. The observer is a necessary workaround if you're attaching code like click handlers with bevy_mod_picking, or if the types aren't reflected and accessible in blender.

[dawn shell]

Completely agree with this. I'll also add that observers are preferable if an object would be accessible in Blender, but has a huge amount of default fields that you would have to manually set, as Blenvy has no concept of ..default()

No idea where UnrealCameraController falls

[dawn shell]

Observers are very low overhead in this specific case. You could squeeze out a bit more performance by using a marker struct with an on_add hook, but that's more of a "cherry on top" kind of thing imo

[brazen ermine]

the controller is a bit of a pain to directly configure and it needs several fields. but it has a bundle that i don't quite understand yet, but this is how i set it up on the .insert

.insert(UnrealCameraBundle::new(
            UnrealCameraController::default(),
            Vec3::new(-2.0, 5.0, 5.0),
            Vec3::new(0., 0., 0.),
            Vec3::Y,
        ));;
      }

And i couldn't figure out how to directly add this inside blenvy in stock form, but for the sake of learning if you can explain how i would do that i'd love to know, it's not avaliable in the component list and its not straightforward to figure out how to add logic to entitys otherwise

[dawn shell]

Looking at the source, you'd need to add these in Blender

Where ::new does this

Looking at UnrealCameraController, there are a huge number of default values that you'd have to copy-paste

So imo, I would use observers in this case

[brazen ermine]

yeah its like 7 of them i think maybe more

[dawn shell]

7 is the correct number

[brazen ermine]

but lets simply the question then, let's say i have a cube and i want to attache specific logic to that cube inside blender (blenvy) how would i attach it to that entity not using an observer lets say i have

fn cube { 
 do stuff;  
}

Is there a way to call cube inside blender or am i looking at it from the wrong angle

[dawn shell]

Looking at one of the nested things inside the LookTransformBundle, Smoother has only private fields. You can set those in Blenvy through reflection, but doing so is naughty. Yeah, you should really stick to observers here

[dawn shell]

You add a Cube marker component inside Blender and then run your systems on entities with said component

pub(super) fn plugin(app: &mut App) {
  app.register_type::<Cube>();
  app.add_systems(Update, do_cube_stuff);
}

#[derive(Debug, Component, Reflect)]
#[reflect(Component)]
struct Cube;

fn do_cube_stuff(mut q_cube: Query<&mut Transform, With<Cube>>) {
  for mut transform in &mut q_cube {
    info!("Cube is at {transform:?}");
    transform.translation += Vec3::X * 5.0;
  }
}

[brazen ermine]

ok so it's just a Struct and it'll appear in the componenet list at that point, if i understand correctly

[dawn shell]

Exactly!

[round cove]

Yeah you're just adding components to objects in blenvy

[dawn shell]

This kind of marker component pattern is very common in ECS in general and nothing Blenvy specific

The only Blenvy specific part is the fact that you insert that component through the UI in Blender as opposed to code

[brazen ermine]

right, my reasoning for using Blenvy is i like to visually prototype, and it probably holds me back on becoming a better coder, but i like to add logic to actual object when i do my prototyping, so i guess i learn that workflow before anything else which may or many not be wrong LOL

especially in ECS workflow

[dawn shell]

Yeah, "adding logic to object" is usually something we don’t do in ECS land 😄

(There are exceptions, but that's more of a reactivity thing with callbacks)

[brazen ermine]

Yeah i figured as much, but for someone new to ECS it's very difficult for someone to explain to them in text, this is how to convert your brain from object based system (most engines) it's hard for me to kinda figure out without trial and error without a full time tutor saying do it like this.. which isn't practical lol

[dawn shell]

It takes some time, agreed. But I'm confident you’ll get there faster than you think 🙂

[grim lance]

@ebon zealot I am so confused.. the ronstring_to_reflect_component gets the whole gltf extra data, which is just one string (btw, is there any reason not making this a Key value hashmap, even the gltf specs suggest that, maybe bevy PR potential?) which you then parse as ron, and either the key is bevy_components, where you call an function to extract the components, or it's not, where you call another function which looks similar, but doesn't remove "component: ", from whereever that comes from..
What's going on there?

How can you even parse json as ron 🤔

what is wrong with blender..
I had it working to the Entity(name:Object.001) part, now wanted to make it between string brackets, it changed nothing, so I had to change the object it selected and now it's Entity(name: \\\"<bpy_struct, Object(\\\"Cube.002\\\") at 0x000002358336A408>\\\") 😭

[grim lance]

when was the last time testing/bevy_example worked?

[tender oyster]

Hard to tell. Currently Blenvy is mostly developed by one developer. It takes a lot of effort to keep docs up to date, fix bugs and add new features.

[dawn shell]

Probably before the Blenvy PR?

[grim lance]

could be

[grim lance]

super interesting.. I really don't know if we need conversions_to_prop_group actually.. It always remembered the relations for me, also with reloading the registry, BUT: The parse_entity part never returned anything, I did a rust-style return, aka. I returned nothing from loading ._. but it still worked

[grim lance]

yay they now work for named fields and lists and I start to understand some parts of the codebase 😄

[dawn shell]

that is supremely cool 👀

How do you link them on Bevy's side?

Name?

(I remember you discussed this, but I don't remember the takeaway)

[grim lance]

it got worse

currently they're stored as Entity(name: Some("NAME")), which works because blender enforces unqiue names

I then have to search for the same name in the same scene instance, because they could be instanciated multiple times

I'm unsure if

• I'll go to the Scene root and traverse down there to search
  or
• search for name first and then look up it's SceneInstance

But first I have to get reflection working, waiting for answers in #1275079261463511092

[grim lance]

Ok, another attempt: having the type first as a dynamic type, then modify the entity values, then make into real struct

meh.. it already fails on the type

[grim lance]

First up: I got a strategy that works for reflection manipulation

Secondly: serialization is broken and I don't know why but pretty sure it's not my code (I'll test it with the normal addon right after this message)
I serialize the entity to Entity(name: (..)) successfully, and I've counted the parens multiple times, but the wrapping ( for the struct doesn't close at the end for some reason. With a 1-depth tuplestruct this isn't a problem, now I wanted to test it with Vec3 and this is the error I get on adding the component

weird.. on the normal addon it doesn't error..

but this is on the normal addon, with Option<String>...

both seem to happen only when I reload the registry, not on the first time ._.

[ebon zealot]

Sorry, for the late reply !
So:

• storage as a string vs hashmap: you can thank Blender for that (again), I tried it, and Blender has a limit of 63 chars for the lenght of the keys !!! so you woud not be able to store full (long names) for components as keys ...
• bevy_components is the canonical way to store ...well bevy components (the ones manipulated via Blender's ui), but I kept the simpler custom properties based components as an escape hatch (because Bevy components's keys NEED to be long_names (ie full paths of components for disambiguation)

[ebon zealot]

Word of advice (because I hit that issue over and over again), is to first try with hard coded "fake ron" value before trying anything dynamic.
There is no built in RON parsing/writing in Python , and up until Blender 4.2 there was not even a half acceptable way of including external libraries (in this case for dealing with RON in a cleaner way)

[ebon zealot]

Around two weeks ago , where I broke things with all the changes. It is not meant for external use at all by the way, it is just a testbed for ... tests, mostly for me, and for CI in the future

[ebon zealot]

Thank you for understanding this 🙂

[ebon zealot]

This means the value for your Vec3 is an int, not an array/list like. Best way to check for validity of Ron stuff, is to output an example in Rust/Bevy
Btw, I really wish there were some online ron validators like there are for json

[ebon zealot]

conversions_to_prop_group should not be needed in 99% of the cases , If I recall right .
You very rarely need to convert strings/ ron to property groups , as in most of the cases the property groups are already generated from the registry file

Folks, could somebody please try to switch Blender to any other language that is not English and try exporting with Blenvy ?
I am trying to track down & fix an issue, but for some reason changing languages has no effect at all on Blender's UI for me ?

[round cove]

using the alpha or does it have to be main branch?

[ebon zealot]

either should work (or not work in this case 😄 ) the same way

[round cove]

oh lmao it breaks because the keys change language

[ebon zealot]

? the keys ?

[round cove]

ViewLayer in english

Calque de vue in french i think

[ebon zealot]

Bingo thanks a lot ! Ok , that is hilarious in a way 🙂
Thanks for trying it out !
I normally have a fix (at least as far as export goes, that special layer is also used in other less important parts)

But also, once again, wow Blender, having internal (non renamable) parts change based on language ..

[dawn shell]

reminds me of excel 😄

[grim lance]

There is no ron stuff there to check, this happens when I add a Vec3 component, or try to, because it won’t add with the error. I hope I can find an easy way to reproduce on the main alpha

[grim lance]

Nothing makes sense, I can't reprod it no matter what I try, blender is dark magic

oh look, the tuplestruct closing param bug is not there anymore.. lets look at my changes
THERE ARE NO 😭

I wonder if that happened because of me changing how the serialization works while blender was running, me changing there stuff for testing + the change detection stuff playing with me

[dawn shell]

That is the consensus, yes 😄

[grim lance]

Good news: i don’t need any thread_local hacks but have direct access to world
Bad news: I‘ve just written 8 files, together around 350 lines of code or so, and opened 2 issues, just to manipulate reflection Type trees

[dawn shell]

Link to the issues?

[grim lance]

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/14846
https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/14847

yess!!! those are extracted from the reflect type hierarchy.
But I can't just apply a completely different kind of reflect item there, so I have to set it from the parent... that will be interesting

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/14850

Bad news: I don't think it will be possible to do the stuff with how sparse the implementation of manipulating dynamic reflect types currently is.. 3 issues, which I'll later try to address/discuss in the reflection dev channel so that we can get better support in 0.15 (hopefully)

but i have one idea left :p

completely hacky (but it's already hacky so who cares)

[grim lance]

YES 🥹

finally

the game doesn't panic anymore

@ebon zealot one question.. The thing where it copies over components.. when/for what does it happen? because i would need to know the new entities :p

because I see that Cube.001 exists twice..

[dawn shell]

love how they are all about bad ergonomics, haha

That is certainly how I felt coding parts of bevy_quickstart

Or getting a skybox working with something other than the one image that is already in the Bevy repo

[grim lance]

not directly bad ergonomics, i was bumping from "impossible by api, ah found a loophole" to the next impossible api inside that loophole :p

like I had to make a mutable version of every iterator, which all had the same piece of "make this to a pointer and back to reference, yes this is safe like for all the other ones"

[ebon zealot]

hmm sorry which one ? the copy and pasting of components between objects ?

[ebon zealot]

Change detection is a brute force (costly ) approach that does not have any impact on the components 😉

[ebon zealot]

Oh wait, or do you mean on the Bevy side ?

[grim lance]

Yeah 😄

There is the removing of some nested entities, which I think is what is happening here, right?

[ebon zealot]

Copying of components happens in order to "merge" the components from the nested entity (as gltf files at least those from blender have an additional, useless nesting level) with the root entity (the one you actually care about as a user).
The children of the nested entity are also copied over to the root entity and finally the nested entity gets despawned.

[ebon zealot]

Yeah, there is that damn annoying useless nested entity below the root entity when spawning gltf files

[grim lance]

The interesting stuff here is that I just have 3 cubes all at root, why are there 2 Cubes.001 summoned?

[ebon zealot]

No clue, cannot determine that without seeing your blender setup, and/or your gltf files or your code, sorry 🙂

[ebon zealot]

Also it might NOT be actually the same entity twice, could just be named the same

[grim lance]

Yeah, I hope when bsn gets more mainstream, the scene stuff doesn’t directly fit on bevy_gltf and that it will be easier

[ebon zealot]

I am keeping a distant eye on bsn for this reason (amongst others 😄 )

[grim lance]

I cannot name multiple objects the same and just init once

[ebon zealot]

Although, that is another complete rabbit hole, because both bsn and gltf are essentially scene description formats
(but gltf is not ONLY a scene description file)

[grim lance]

I am always like „ohh editor stuff will be so cool to help“ but then there are just big PRs and not really easy help… and I want to do graph stuff first, and school also will start soon.. meh

[grim lance]

Wait i can send a link

[ebon zealot]

It depends, not 100% from the Blender side , but even then , there are some corner cases

[grim lance]

https://github.com/DasLixou/Blenvy/tree/entity-references/examples/relations

[grim lance]

Huh? That would be? It is scene/level independent and I disallow to select stuff in other collections

[ebon zealot]

I'll be honest, I currently won't have much time to look at things , I haven't even had time to post about the release of the crate in the crates channel or showcase , sorry.
I'll try to sneak a peak as soon as I can

[grim lance]

No problem 😄

[ebon zealot]

the mesh and the object containing it are both called cube 😄

[ebon zealot]

not from your example btw 😄

[grim lance]

(That wasn’t meant as ‚ass‘, that was emoji completion with touchkeyboard)

[ebon zealot]

No worries hahaha 😄

[grim lance]

Yeah but the ‚object‘ I can select is just the top one… or are those two different entities on export?

[ebon zealot]

There is also auto naming in Blenvy, where if you spawn a blueprint into an entity without a Name component will automatically be given one based on the blueprint's name

[grim lance]

Ah that is why there is an entity called World :0

Thought that was some weird bevy scene shenanigan 😄

[ebon zealot]

hmm , I honnestly am not sure anymore, I think Bevy treats them as seperate entities, (because I have queries with explicit mesh queries)

[ebon zealot]

There is a ton of "quality of life"/ make your own work easier tooling in Blenvy

[ebon zealot]

I mean vs higher level entity queries

[grim lance]

Ah now I get it… nodes get normal GltfExtras and mesh, etc. are custom entities with GltfMeshExtras? O.o

[ebon zealot]

If you have custom properties/ components at the mesh level then yes 🙂

[grim lance]

Undocumented quality of life

And you then merge the mesh on the node above?

[ebon zealot]

Not really necessary kind of remark, but whatever, please refer to the "alpha" sticker 😉

[grim lance]

I really sometimes have the wish to rewrite bevy_gltf at some places.. the extras could be a map, as they are in the specs, one could mark the nodes, meshes, etc. better with marker components, asset path queries with named references instead of indices, etc.

[ebon zealot]

nope, the only hierarchy I touch is really the useless (and problematic extra empty entity below the root)

[grim lance]

// IMPORTANT: this assumes that merging works this way, update this when merging works differently that will be then 😄

[ebon zealot]

This has been a recuring theme for a loooong time, there are PRs underway that go in that direction

[grim lance]

:0

At some point I should also try to implement my 3 issues for reflection

It’s like „ahh this is impossible currently, I need a really ugly workaround and open an issue, I don’t want to wait for bevy 0.15“ but then I already have the workaround so why bother implementing it?

[dawn shell]

I think that comment was supposed to respond to

Undocumented quality of life

[grim lance]

No, it is what Ill put on my code which finds the right entity with the name, and which entity is the correct is currently „alpha“

But I kinda want to do it with ids now.. searching the whole tree, or even all names, seems really expensive

[dawn shell]

Alright, my bad 🙂

[dawn shell]

Yeah, that seems really painful

[grim lance]

but with an internal component, that isn’t loaded when other components load.. arghhh

[grim lance]

yeah I now know where the other cubes come from.. not even named correctly, this will be fun

damn #13681 looks so promising

[grim lance]

BLENVY RELATIONS WORKING

You don't know how lucky y'all are: no more messages from a lil kiddo crying about code every 5 minutes

https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/pull/236

[dawn shell]

OH. MY. GOD.

I did not expect that to ever work

holy heck, good job!

[grim lance]

thanks 😄

[grim lance]

Now it's time to test that with avian joints >:3

first, let me delete 8GiB of target folder or my PC won't have enough space to reboot again

[coral anchor]

OH MY GOD THANK YOU

[gusty fiber]

finally had time to check out the new blenvy version, and the setup is so much faster now!

Just couldn't get hot reloading to work.

How does it work (I added the file-watchter to the bevy features.

[ebon zealot]

It seems the Bevy v0.14 release broke hot reloading 😦 there is an issue on the Bevy github, I'll post it later.
It used to work well in the RC/ pre-release version, now it only partially works (+ most likely remaining bugs on the Blenvy side)

[gusty fiber]

https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/14698#issue-2459286384

I think it’s this issue?

[ebon zealot]

Exactly !

[dawn shell]

@ebon zealot I fixed the clippy errors on https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/pull/232.
Additionally, I recommend https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/pull/240 for merging (which also includes https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/pull/241)

[sand ledge]

@ebon zealot hey, blenvy is a great tool that'd i'd like to contribute to as i start integrating it into my workflow

is there a tracking page anywhere besides the github issues page?

[dawn shell]

Pretty sure there is not

[dawn shell]

There's an easy first PR available with https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/issues/223, if you need a place to get started

That issue says "document", but you could also instead make the cameras spawned by Blenvy to inherit the settings from Blender. This should be a good first PR imo 🙂

This here would be the correct module to put this functionality under.

[dawn shell]

Extra bonus points if you somehow manage to make new cameras in Blender have the same defaults as Bevy, but idk how hard that part is 😄

[dawn shell]

@ebon zealot could you help me out if you find time? I'd like to port Foxtrot to Blenvy and have started by adapting the bike game Blend file, which used to work with the pre-alpha plugin.
I installed the alpha plugin, went through the Blend file and removed all components other than Avian ones.
When I save the file, one of two things happens:

• The file saves, but nothing is generated by Blenvy, or
• Blenvy tries to generate stuff, but runs into the error below
  This is the link to the blend file: https://github.com/janhohenheim/foxtrot/tree/rework/art

When I click on this funky button...

...I get this

[dawn shell]

Update on this: when I manually create the levels directory, the ron file gets created. No luck with the rest though

[dawn shell]

Update 2: I found the culprit. Blenvy is not able to export anything as long as one of my objects in my library has an Armature modifier.

If you want to test this yourself, the offending blueprint is Npc Pizza before this commit

Sidenote: can I make the generated RON files use LF on Windows?

I'm running dos2unix on them right now, but every time I save something in Blender, it reverts my line endings to CRLF 😅

[sand ledge]

yeah this is the sort of thing i was hoping to help smooth out

like for example if you use folders that aren't in the root folder the generated ron files mixes backslahes and forward slashes in the file paths and bevy can't parse it

[grim lance]

Maybe just delete the asset folder completely and save?

[dawn shell]

Tried that, didn’t work. See my follow-up posts for what did work

[slow lotus]

Are there any notes on how the upcoming scene/bsn changes are going to affect Blenvy? From searching this thread, I get the feeling that Blenvy plans to stay gltf centric and that there is overlap between the blenvy crate and what bsn plans to support?

[round cove]

hard to say how it will impact without any implementation of bsn IMO. Blender exports gltfs, but you could theoretically use them in a bsn-described scene or whatnot. gltf != bsn even though gltf can be scenes.

[final aspen]

just wondering how hard would it be to automaticly generate avain colliders from the mesh? but instead of using the mesh directly if possible use the shape.
i.e. if you make a cube and add a colider Blenvy would get the size of the cube and create a colider with same dimensions?

[round cove]

sounds like it leads to some "infer value from blender property" type functionality

[grim lance]

Ok i think I now have a relatively clear plan for 0% unsafe (ok maybe not 0%, I want to experiment with making attributes unsafe :p) entity relations 🎉 I’m excited for all the PRs to bevy I have in mind 😄 but, should we wait for bevy 0.15 and modify my PR or merge (atleast review?) the hacky one first?

[sonic hollow]

@dawn shellHI！Does blenvy currently support importing point lights into bevy (or serializing them into ron)? I have a Blender scene with many point lights.🙂

[low glade]

i think it's supported yes

at least I think in my level the point lights get added to bevy automatically, but maybe I added a component on them, not sure though

[rich helm]

Point, spot and directional lights (sun) get automatically added. You'll just have to figure out the intensities to match.

[dawn shell]

Why would you wait for 0.15? Do required components significantly change it?

[dawn shell]

Yeah, all lights are automatically added to Bevy 🙂

[sonic hollow]

Okay, thank you all.

[grim lance]

No I don’t think required components will do anything to blenvy, but I will surely merge (or at least try to) a lot of stuff to make working with world and modifying reflection trees „easier“ (in the sense that I don’t have to do unsafe shenanigans to achieve stuff)

Current list is

• directly put Handle<GltfNode> on gltf nodes
• make fake-reflect possible in-house (needs look at unsafe attributes)
• create/init multiple non-clashing system params from DeferredWorld safely
• visit over reflection type tree
• replace contents of reflection fields entirely
• directly hook visiting into parsing (optional, not sure if performance impact is that big)
• edit and remove fields in dynamic types (optional, isn’t needed anymore but the issue currently kinda contains both replace values and replace whole fields so I’ll just list it here)

That should make all the pointer shenanigans to e.g. have multiple worlds because every query needs one, static threadlocals to pass data around etc. go away and the only „unsafe“ thing remaining would ideally be #[unsafe reflect(fake = bevy_ecs::entity::Entity)] but I have to test if I can just put an unsafe there with custom parsing 😄

[grim lance]

https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/edition-guide/rust-2024/unsafe-attributes.html
Really..? Even more nesting in attributes 😭 but funny how 1.82 „added“ something, did I miss anything?

[round cove]

1.81 is coming out tomorrow, so it'll be another 6 weeks before 1.82 😅 -- https://releases.rs/docs/1.81.0/

[grim lance]

Isn’t it already out? releases.rs says so

[round cove]

it is now the 5th, yes. usually the announcements don't go out for another 10 hours or so

[grim lance]

Or is it doing some weird local timezone shenanigan

Oh ok

I just look at releases.rs and when there’s only 2 versions I know it released

[round cove]

nods

I've had to track it before for videos, which is the only reason I know

[dawn shell]

@ebon zealot how does Blenvy's asset preloading work right now? What do I do if I want to properly wait in a state until every sub-gltf required by a world is done loading? I know I could just manually wait for all generated gltfs, but I remember you mentioned that Blenvy does something like that internally now. Note that I'd like to do this before actually spawning the blueprint.

[dawn shell]

Looking at the code, it seems like the preloading is happening while spawning. Can I somehow trigger that manually by sending an event?

[dawn shell]

Also, I'm getting these again with freshly generated blueprints. That's a bug, right?

And here it is in a glTF:

[solemn echo]

I'm less sure how this works for worlds since I've only been using blueprints, but from what I understand, Blenvy adds to the meta.ron file the list of GLTF blueprints that will be used in the blueprint. The blueprint then only spawns once all those handles are loaded. On the Blender side, collection instances are replaced with their own BlueprintInfo component and a SpawnHere component, which will cause those instances to get spawned on the next frame.

So in other words, a system takes BlueprintInfo, finds its meta file, then stores all those handles, waits for them all to be loaded, and then spawns the root after that.

And then child blueprints go through the same process over the course of the next frames (I think)

[dawn shell]

That matches what I've seen in the code. So the short answer is: Blenvy only loads stuff when spawning. I guess I could loop through the meta.ron file to get the paths to load

[ebon zealot]

Hi folks ! Sorry for the lack of reply in the past few weeks, had barely any time and currently in the hospital for the birth of my son. Will reply to the various questions and issues as soon as I can. Sorry to keep you waiting.

[dawn shell]

All good

[grim lance]

Family > bevy

[gusty fiber]

First time?

[grim lance]

Ok back from vacation, tried something yesterday night but my lifetime-knowledge seems to be "rusty" (oh wow, a "dad" joke, I'm so funny...).
Tried it again today, and got rid of most of the unsafe code I didn't like 😄 (what I was looking for already existed, just was hard to find)

[grim lance]

so yeah, anyone bored, feel free to review :3

[dawn shell]

@ebon zealot I'm investigating a weird issue that is causing my objects to spawn with a wrong Transform on the first frame. During that, I noticed that GltfComponentsSet is never added to any schedule. This means that GltfBlueprintsSet is in fact not ordered after GltfComponentsSet::Injection, even if the code looks like it is. This is a really really subtle thing Bevy ignores without warning.

Do you think this might be causing some issues?

[dawn shell]

Update: that wasn't it, but I'll submit a tiny PR later anyways

[dawn shell]

Update 2: yeah, the issue is coming from Avian, not from Blenvy. Still, here's a little bugfix: https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/pull/243 😄

[dawn shell]

o.O

Ooh, you added a .blend and .glb. That seems less scary 😅

Why do you not just use Some? Same for Result, Box, into, etc.
Pretty sure clippy will yell about that once someone does a general linting pass.

This is a pretty cool trick though. That assert would hit at compile time, right?

[dawn shell]

Update 3: okay, Blenvy might still be part of the issue. I sometimes get entities with a valid GlobalTransform and an invalid Transform. I made sure Avian is not manipulating the Transform anymore, so maybe Blenvy is sometimes adding components in a weird order? Then again, Transform and GlobalTransform should be inserted by Bevy's scene spawning stuff, right?

[grim lance]

As the comment states above, this is the output for cargo expand with minimal changes so changes to bevy’s derive macro can be done easier. You could suggest a clippy „shut up“ thing tho 😄

[grim lance]

Yes 😄

[dawn shell]

Ooooh right, that makes sense

Wer lesen kann ist klar im Vorteil

[grim lance]

Yes

[grim lance]

IIRC blend and glb don't count as lines but theres a 14k registry.json 😄

[cloud tartan]

I am currently trying blenvy and followed the quickstart. I have now a collection in Library with a Rotator Component that has a speed value. I want to instance two of these entities with different speed values, but changing one also changes the other. What can I do?

[grim lance]

When you want the component on the root of the instance, you can remove the component completely from the library and put it on the collection instance in world i think. otherwise there currently is as far as i know no way of doing this with instances, so you would have to clone all of them

[cloud tartan]

Thank you. I will try that

[dawn shell]

You can add the component on top of the spawned instance @grim lance

It's not very documented yet, but that will override the "inner" value, so to speak

Does that make sense? It's a bit hard to describe 😄

[grim lance]

thats what I meant, but I would then also remove the old one and that doesn't work for nested stuff, does it?

[cloud tartan]

Thats useful, ty

[dawn shell]

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you don't have to remove the old / inner component.

IIRC Blenvy on the Rust side makes sure to overwrite the inner with the outer component while it is removing the intermediate entity in the hierarchy

(don't quote me on the implementation details, haha)

[grim lance]

I know that you dont have to (because that would require more logic that definitely isn't there 😄 ) but it seems like an common error source, and I'm not sure if it will overwrite changes or everything

[grim lance]

also, what happened to the review? :3c

[dawn shell]

It will overwrite the component that is duplicated on the parent IIRC

[dawn shell]

ah heck, you're right! thanks for the reminder

[cloud tartan]

I have tested it. It works perfectly

[grim lance]

whut? parent?
No what I meant is that it probably stores all the properties, so "merging" will replace everything and then when users expect to be able to change some other value in the component in the library, it won't work.

[dawn shell]

Maybe my wording is not clear, sorry. I'll show a screenshot of what I mean 🙂

In the library, I put the components on the collection named Box

got a rigidbody there

In the world, the object named Crate.001 can be used to override this specific instance

[grim lance]

:0

multiple collections, smart

[dawn shell]

for example, like this I have just changed the rigid body of just one box

[dawn shell]

Hmm? I only have one collection in this example, namely Box.

The stuff in world looks like that when using a collection instance

[grim lance]

oh Crate is the instance of Box, right?

[dawn shell]

Exactly!

[grim lance]

yeah that's what I've meant the whole time 😄 sorry- blender is confusing

[dawn shell]

haha, agreed

[grim lance]

what i meant is that when rigidbody has two values, you can't easily just overwrite one because it will overwrite all of it

so it would be better to not have the same component on both

[dawn shell]

That is true

[dawn shell]

I mean, sure, but then you end up with 99 crates that all have the same component copy-pasted. Then I add a new field to the component and I have to change all 99 😅

[grim lance]

well then split the component apart 😄

[dawn shell]

But why, if I can already override specific instances?

If my dialog component used to make sense with 2 fields, but now after a rework it only makes sense with 3 fields, it seems wrong to put that new field in its own component just to save time on updating the scene in Blender imo

[grim lance]

when you know what you're doing.. but at the moment you want to change the field that is the same for all instances, you feel bad for that decision 😄

[dawn shell]

Yeah, that’s completely true

[frail tiger]

Hejhej! Is the json the file that is constantly written to, when using blenvy? I would like to know what to ignore when using cargo watch 🙂

Maybe I should default to ignoring assets anyway because of hot reloading 🤔

[dawn shell]

The json is being written to when starting the game, yes 🙂

[cloud tartan]

Is it possible to reference another mesh with Handle<Mesh> in blender with Blenvy?

[dawn shell]

Nope, Handle has no meaning before the app is actually running

But @grim lance's branch allows you to reference another Entity

[grim lance]

mesh would involve even more shenanigans because of how it has a special meaning in gltf, sadly

you could try to put custom data on a mesh, reference that as handle<mesh> and resolve it in a fork of blenvy, just like I did for entities, but beware of blender hating you

[dawn shell]

Just use a marker component, it will save you the headache 😄

[grim lance]

and I hate blender, currently waiting for a response in a half-dead seeming help forum for "how can I use 3rd party package in my addon" because I want wasmtime because my simple doing-nothing iterator is running and blocking the app since 20 minutes, the array would probably be finished in rust in 2 seconds

[grim lance]

marker component on what? O.o

[dawn shell]

On the mesh they want to reference

Assuming they just want a relation to an entity holding a specific mesh

If they want a specific mesh out of all possible meshes… yeah, that’s gonna be tough

Outside of just writing out the raw string

[cloud tartan]

Thanks. How would I reference another entity then?

[grim lance]

https://github.com/kaosat-dev/Blenvy/pull/236
This is currently my proposal for that

[cloud tartan]

Thank you- SOunds really useful

[glass abyss]

how can i tell blenvy not to look for materials in rust since i unchecked the split out materials box in blender?

ERROR bevy_asset::server: Path not found: D:\Dev\Rust\horror_game\dev_assets\models\materials/Ch20_body.glb

[glass abyss]

also in blender can i make objects with different sizes without changing the transform scale? like for example making a Cuboid in bevy i can change the size but i can keep the transform scale the same (xyz at 1.0), how can i do the same with blender?

[open steeple]

apply transform scale

[glass abyss]

but thats exactly what i don't want to do, as it messes with physics and other components that rely on transform

[open steeple]

did you try reading it?

[glass abyss]

oh... 🤦‍♂️ thanks

[glass abyss]

called `Option::unwrap()` on a `None` value
Encountered a panic in system `blenvy::blueprints::animation::trigger_blueprint_animation_markers_events`!

is blenvy messing with animations? and is there a way to turn it off?

[tender oyster]

What if Blenvy worked directly with blend format instead of exporting to GLTF? Saving changes would take lass time and resources. Working with blend format directly would also allow to support huge amount of features that are not included in GLTF. How hard it would be to make Blenvy work with blend directly? Godot for example has native blend support.

[open steeple]

afaik godot just converts it to gltf

same as unity

[tender oyster]

Someone already tried to make bevy work with blend format https://github.com/jeraldamo/bevy_blender
(not sure if it works directly with blend or converts to GLTF internally)

[earnest sky]

Hi! Ive been using Blenvy to add meshes to the scene and attach Avian3d colliders to them. The mesh I add is a cube, the collider is also a cube with the same dimensions added via ColliderConstructor::Cuboid. Additionally, I add Sensor component, as I do not need the collider react physically to any interaction with it.
Later on I can query for this mesh from inside bevy, and I do indeed see collider attached to the mesh. The bevy_inspector_egui also shows it in the components hierarchy.

However, when I try to query for CollidingEntities, I dont have any entities in there. But when I do the same mesh + collider setup in Bevy programmatically, I do get CollidingEntities correctly. If I take a look at the components attached to meshes from Blender and from Bevy, they are identical, except for the Blender ones having additional Gltf-thingies.

Another interesting thing is that if I try to add collider in Blender via ColliderConstructor::ConvexHullFromMesh I do get CollidingEntities (the shape of collider is wrong, but thats a whole another issue).

I have enabled PhysicsDebugPlugin and I do see colliders with a proper shape in the rendered frame for both the mesh I have added through Blender and from inside Bevy.

What could be the reason for CollidingEntities being empty (i.e. no collisions being detected)?

ps: this is a repost from help channel, thought this place may be more appropriate for such a question.

[cloud tartan]

Does Blenvy support Hot Reload, so when I change my blend file, bevy reloads the changes, like when changing the position of a model or adding a cube?

[open steeple]

doesn't it mention hot-reload as a feature somewhere on main page?

[cloud tartan]

It does, but it does not always work. When I edit a mesh or material it works. When I add a new mesh or change a parameter of a component, it doesn't. I also cannot detect changes in Queries with Changed<T>

[rich helm]

I'm not completely sure about this, but I think gltf hot-reloading was broken in 0.14 somehow. I also don't get hot-reloading for the levels, but the meshes and materials are hot-reloaded correctly.

Unrelated: What is the recommended way to "preload" blueprints? I would like to load up the blueprint gltf during a loading screen so I can spawn instances of said blueprint without having to wait for any loading.

[round cove]

I don't know about "recommended" but there's been a few instances of using bevy-asset-loader to pre-load assets.

[rich helm]

I'm just wondering whether it's enough to load the gltf blueprint once into memory during a loading step to have SpawnBlueprint work nicely. To me it seems like I get a one frame flash of a non-ready mesh or material when I spawn things directly with BlueprintInfo runtime - not only on the first object, but even when spawning further objects.

My question boils down to: What should I do, to get the nicest end user experience with no glitches?
A) Spawn stuff with (BlueprintInfo, SpawnBlueprint, HideUntilReady) during gameplay
OR
B) Spawn one blueprint during loading, and then clone this entity with all relevant components

[glass abyss]

is it possible to only apply this system to blender cameras and leave normal ones alone?
it's in src/components/blender_settings/lighting.rs

fn process_tonemapping(
    tonemappings: Query<(Entity, &BlenderToneMapping), Added<BlenderToneMapping>>,
    cameras: Query<Entity, With<Camera>>,
    mut commands: Commands,
) {
    for entity in cameras.iter() {
        for (scene_id, tone_mapping) in tonemappings.iter() {
            match tone_mapping {
                BlenderToneMapping::None => {
                    //println!("TONEMAPPING NONE");
                    commands.entity(entity).remove::<Tonemapping>();
                }
                BlenderToneMapping::AgX => {
                    //println!("TONEMAPPING Agx");
                    commands.entity(entity).insert(Tonemapping::AgX);
                }
                BlenderToneMapping::Filmic => {
                    //println!("TONEMAPPING Filmic");
                    commands.entity(entity).insert(Tonemapping::BlenderFilmic);
                }
            }
            commands.entity(scene_id).remove::<BlenderToneMapping>();
        }
    }
}

[rich helm]

I would assume it leaves other cameras alone, unless they have the BlenderToneMapping component 🤔

[cloud tartan]

Can you disable Blenvy overriding the DirectionalLightShadowMap? I want to control it myself with a settingmenu, but it gets overriden when i load a new level

[tender oyster]

Just in case. There is a crate https://github.com/lukebitts/blend for parsing blend files that should simplify making blenvy work directly with blend format instead of gltf.

[round cove]

Using blend files outside of blender seems to be heavily discouraged: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blend-file-errors/15985/2

And it seems largely undocumented and unstable as a format (so including it in blenvy is probably not a good idea)

[tender oyster]

Blend is blender main format and from blender perspective blend is very stable. So if an external parser is written properly it should be stable. It seems that documentation is sparse but it shouldn't be an issue once you get acquainted with the structure and we can read blender source. Parser won't even need to parse the whole file structure. Only what's needed.

Export on save to gltf is expensive. For testing and small projects it works but it gets slow once the project grows, even on fast machines.

Plus gltf doesn't support a lot of features.

[round cove]

Do you know of a spec somewhere or something that I'm unaware of? I'm curious as to what makes you confident enough to say it would be stable when the core developers (from the link I posted) say it won't be and are actively saying "don't do this".

My first advice here is always, don’t write a .blend file reader or writer. It’s Blender’s internal file format and we make no guarantee that it remains stable or try to document all the quirks.

[tender oyster]

What makes me say it's stable is the fact that blend is not some alpha/beta testing format. It's blender main format. It's very stable from blender perspective. Blender reads and wires to it.
Of course there can and will be changes in the format structure with new blender versions but it shouldn't be hard to fix.

I don't know why the developer says it's unstable. Maybe they just don't want to write docs, migration guides and answer relented questions. But fact is a fact. If the blender works with it than something else can work too when written properly.

[round cove]

I think you're using a different definition of stable than they are. Typically "there was a released version of it that isn't being updated" is not what maintainers mean by stable. stable usually means something more like usable across versions: for example it would work across 4.1.0 and 4.1.1 (or 4.1 and 4.2, etc)

the fact that the .blend extension is used for the file across many blender versions does not mean all .blend files are compatible with all blender versions, for example

"it would need to be updated for potentially every single release, and maintained as different versions for each of those releases to work properly" is exactly what is meant by unstable.

truly the effort here would require tracking basically all applicable changes to the .blend file that make their way into the blender repo, which is imo a very large amount of work.

[tender oyster]

Parser can just check the blend version before parsing and use appropriate parser version or show an error if input blend version is not supported (in a similar way blender does it). Blenvy not necessarily need to support every blender version and for example only the latest version or LTS.
Blend file will also contain a lot of blender specific data that external parsers won't need.
I've checked this https://github.com/jeraldamo/bevy_blender parser and it is quite small (but it doesn't have a lot of features).

[tender oyster]

Also reading blender exporter to gltf and bevy gltf reader should help with some things.

One thing I'm not sure of is if we need to apply object modifiers (including geometry nodes) when parsing object data from blend or modifiers already stored in applied state. If we need to apply object modifiers when parsing objects it will probably complicate things.

I do not insist, just sharing info.

[rich helm]

What’s the status of Blenvy right now? I can see many juicy PRs unreviewed and unmerged. We’re building our blueprints and levels using it, so just wanna know if we should have a plan B.. 😄

[round cove]

status is maintainers are busy with life but its still a project that everyone is interested in maintaining

[silver rune]

Hi new to blenvy here, am curious as to how to preload a material:
materials file materials/Ship.glb should have been preloaded skipping

.

Another question is what does injecting materials do:
Step 6: injecting/replacing materials

[shut drift]

Hi! So I followed the quick start guide, and I've created a Library scene and a World scene. I create my blueprints in the Library scene, but they're never exported to assets/blueprints, unless I first instance them in the World scene. Which is tedious, because I don't want them in my world, I want to spawn them dynamically. Am I missing something, or is this the only way to get them to be exported as blueprints?