Hi,

I'm a totally beginner to Blender. Please help me....

Is there any way to export a Blender file in any readable format ?
I'd like to know what the Blender file looks like....


Thanks in advance....

Just recently we've been told that the fileformat is essentially a form of memorydump, and there is currently no way to turn it into a more understandable format. Your best bet is to use a python script to dump the internals to a fairly readable ASCII-file using eeshlo's BF2PY script, which you can get here: http://mysite.iptic.com/eeshlo/BF2PY.zip

Since it depends on the Python API of Blender, you cannot expect to get all the info - only classes supported by the API. I'm pretty sure that it will not work on Blender 2.25, but it will most certainly do with 2.23. [please someone correct me if I'm wrong here]

Good luck!

blasc is a perl script that does exactly wot ur asking:
i was looking for a similar thing today.
http://www.hillfamily.net/ritchie/blasc/

Jamesk wrote:

Just recently we've been told that the fileformat is essentially a form of memorydump, and there is currently no way to turn it into a more understandable format. Your best bet is to use a python script to dump the internals to a fairly readable ASCII-file using eeshlo's BF2PY script, which you can get here: http://mysite.iptic.com/eeshlo/BF2PY.zip Since it depends on the Python API of Blender, you cannot expect to get all the info - only classes supported by the API. I'm pretty sure that it will not work on Blender 2.25, but it will most certainly do with 2.23. [please someone correct me if I'm wrong here]

A rather late answer, but just incase anyone still reads this...

The blendfile converter is an independent python module, so it will work with any python/blenderversion.
You can use it without blender, it just converts the blendfile data to python classes, so you can get the data in the same way as you would get data from current blender python API datablocks.
As an example, this is the included simple example file to print out some information about textures that are used by materials, something you cannot do with the current Blender python API:

Code:

# BFReader simple example script to print information about a material import Blender from BFREAD import * # Analyse the last loaded or saved blendfile filename = Blender.Get('filename') # read it in bf = BFReader(filename) # get the data, we are not interested in the raw output here bf.getData(['Material', 'MTex', 'Tex', 'Image']) # and convert to python... FBlenderM = bf.convert2Python() print "Raw Data was converted to %d class instances" % len(FBlenderM.Clist) # Print out some info about all materials found in the file, like Material texture & image names for mt in FBlenderM.getMaterial():    print "\n",mt    print "Material %s uses %d textures\n" % (mt.id.name, len(mt.mtex))    for mtex in mt.mtex:       if mtex:          texture = mtex.tex          print "Texture name: ", texture.id.name          image = texture.ima          if image:             print "Texture uses image:"             print "Image name: ", image.id.name             print "Image path: ", image.name          else:             print "No image"          print print "That's it..."

For comparison, this is is what you get when do a dir(material) on a a material as returned from blender:

Code:

['B', 'G', 'R', '_object', 'alpha', 'amb', 'assignIpo', 'clrIpo', 'emit', 'haloS ize', 'hard', 'ipo', 'mirB', 'mirG', 'mirR', 'mode', 'ref', 'spec', 'specB', 'sp ecG', 'specR', 'specTransp']

Some of these are of course functions, so the actual data is a bit sparse at the moment. But this is what you get from the blendfile reader:

Code:

[Material MAMaterial.001] ['add', 'address', 'alpha', 'amb', 'ambb', 'ambg', 'ambr', 'ang', 'b', 'colormod el', 'dynamode', 'emit', 'fh', 'fhdist', 'flareboost', 'flarec', 'flaresize', 'f riction', 'g', 'har', 'hasize', 'id', 'ipo', 'kfac', 'lay', 'linec', 'mapto', 'm irb', 'mirg', 'mirr', 'mode', 'mode2', 'mtex', 'name', 'pad', 'pad1', 'pr_back',  'pr_lamp', 'pr_type', 'r', 'ref', 'reflect', 'ren', 'rgbsel', 'ringc', 'scriptl ink', 'seed1', 'seed2', 'septex', 'spec', 'specb', 'specg', 'specr', 'spectra', 'starc', 'subsize', 'texact', 'texco', 'xyfrict', 'zoffs']

So pretty much all the data, I don't think anything is missing(?).

And as another example, the actual data from a Bone class, something also not accesible using the current python API:

Code:

[Bone IK_foot.L] address  =  0x00e1c13c childbase  =  [ListBase 0s000578c4] defmat  =  [[1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0], [0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0], [0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0], [0 .0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0]] dist  =  1.0 dloc  =  [0.0, 0.0, 0.0] dquat  =  [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0] dsize  =  [0.0, 0.0, 0.0] flag  =  32 head  =  [2.1754440000000002, -4.9990230000000002, -1.405597] id  =  None irestmat  =  [[0.25883499999999998, 0.86133599999999999, -0.43715399999999999, 0 .0], [-0.86133599999999999, 0.00099299999999999996, -0.50803399999999999, 0.0], [-0.43715399999999999, 0.50803399999999999, 0.74215699999999996, 0.0], [-5.48338 50000000002, -1.1547369999999999, -0.54549499999999995, 1.0]] loc  =  [0.0, 0.0, 0.0] name  =  IK_foot.L next  =  None obmat  =  [[1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0], [0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0], [0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0], [0. 0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0]] parent  =  None parmat  =  [[1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0], [0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0], [0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0], [0 .0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0]] posemat  =  [[0.25883499999999998, -0.86133599999999999, -0.43715399999999999, 0 .0], [0.86133599999999999, 0.00099299999999999996, 0.50803399999999999, 0.0], [- 0.43715399999999999, -0.50803399999999999, 0.74215699999999996, 0.0], [2.1754440 000000002, -4.9990230000000002, -1.405597, 1.0]] prev  =  [Bone Toes.L] quat  =  [1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0] roll  =  0.0 size  =  [1.0, 1.0, 1.0] tail  =  [3.5645259999999999, -4.9974220000000003, -0.586287] weight  =  1.0

Well, maybe someone will find a use for it, except me, no one else has ever used it sofar as far as I know. Of course it could (and should) all be simpler to get this data, but I'm sure that is only a matter of time before that is possible with an improved python API, or other options maybe.

eeshlo,

That BF2PY sounds like just the utility I need for a project I am working on. Could you please tell me where I can download it. The links on this page don't seem to be working.