.blend File Format

[andygeers]

(cross-posted to elYsium forum)

Am I just being blind, or is it surprisingly hard to track down any information on Blender's native file format, .blend? I'd like to implement a .blend importer for my game engine, but can't find anything whatsoever - the documentation seems strangely lacking in this area.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

[simonharvey]

Am I just being blind, or is it surprisingly hard to track down any information on Blender's native file format, .blend? I'd like to implement a .blend importer for my game engine, but can't find anything whatsoever - the documentation seems strangely lacking in this area.

The reason why is because it changes, ie. bits are added and modified in every release.

The stock answer here (since this shows up in the forums ~3 months) is to reverse engineer one of the python exporters that comes with the standard blender installation. So as to export it to a fileformat that your game engine can understand.

Kind Regards
Simon Harvey

[Brandano]

Rather than bits beingmodified between releases, the Blender file format is close to a representation of the Blender memory state at save time. It's not an exact representation, but writing an importer for it can be rather complex. The best option is to write an exporter for your game engine in Python rather than writing an importer for Blender files. That said, someone already managed to write a program that reads Blender files, Jorrit, the author of the CrystalSpace game engine, but even that effort is being superceded by a script collection