Introduction

Blender 3D is a very actively developed piece of software. Every new version introduces new features, but also some changes that may cause unexpected problems for the third party plugin developers – like me ;-) This was the case when they started 2.6x branch. There were so many changes to API that Dark Exporter occurred to be incompatible. I’ve realized that the only solution is to rewrite Dark Exporter from scratch. This introduction is a general overview of the changes in Dark Exporter 2.

The new version is not fully compatible with the previous one. The biggest difference is a new approach to double-sided materials. Dark Exporter 1 was using a two-side option of the mesh to test if the particular face was double-sided or not. This method was fairly complex because every mesh had to be examined per face. Once the face has been detected to have two-side flag on, the plugin had to test the material applied to that face and add a 'DBL' attribute to the material. 

In Blender 2.6x the API has changed very much. One of the changes was dropping the two-side attribute from the mesh options. This particular atribute is acctually still available, but requires to switch to the Blender Game Engine to deal with it. To get rid of this problem I've decided to control double-sidedness on per material level. It is now a lot more Dark Engine compliant and the above described complex algorithm wasn't necessary anymore.

The other material settings remained intact. This means that if you want to update your models created in Blender 2.5x with Dark Exporter 1 there shouldn't be any problem to edit them in Blender 2.6x with Dark Exporter 2 unless your model was using two-side option. In this case you have to update it manualy in your model. The details of how to deal with double-sided materials is given in the Double-Sided Materials chapter.

Remember that it’s always possible to use Blender for creating custom models for Thief games without Dark Exporter. Dark Exporter is only a helper that simplifies the whole process.

There are two things I can recommend for everyone who wants to use Blender for creating models for Thief games:

• Do everything manually in Blender without Dark Exporter

  • Use Blender 2.6x with Dark Exporter 2