Importing meshes in Bella GUI

[the steam dyer]

Hi,
I’m very interested in testing out Bella and this might come as a trivial question, but since there are no docs yet I’d rather be sure.
Is the GUI just for scenes exported by the plugin? I’m not a Maya user and I wanted to import a few meshes autherd in Blender to then make the materials and the lighting inside the GUI, but I can’t figure out how to import something, if it’s possible, nor how to start the IPR (from what I understand there are a number of things to setup first).
I think a quickstart doc would be very useful.
Thanks!

[Albert Martinez]

Hi dyer,

thanks for trying Bella. We will be sharing documentation as soon as possible, it’s very important.

Bella GUI actually reads [BSA], [BSX], and [BSZ] file formats which are the definition of a Bella’s scene depending on it’s ascii, binary, or binary including all resources dependences.

At this moment Maya is the only plugin that generates them, we will be adding others being the next ones Rhinoceros ( in progress ), Sketchup, etc. So unfortunately we have not yet available Blender platform.

Just to say, we made Bella ascii format [BSA] to be editable and understandable with a simple notepad, so theoretically, anyone could write an exporter from Blender, or from others intermediate known formats like [OBJ], [FBX], etc to Bella. Then inside GUI you can create or change materials, navigate on the scene, render, etc.

[Jeremy Hill]

I will add, that while we do not intend for Bella GUI ever to become a full-fledged 3D modeler itself, it is definitely planned for the future, to create nodes that are capable of directly referencing various file types, as well as other Bella scenes.

In addition, our sales model of including every available plugin with every license will also help, once we have plugins for more than just Maya.

[the steam dyer]

That’s unfortunate, I really hope someone will make an exporter soon enough. Blender has a huge user pool so it would probably help a lot the diffusion of Bella. USD format would also be great.

[Jeremy Hill]

Blender has certainly been mentioned to us quite a bit; being GPL it can be difficult to integrate a commercial renderer, but this is part of the reason it was important to have an open text-based format like BSA.

During early development I wrote a quick SketchUp exporter, so the other developers could more easily create scenes for themselves, and since BSA is just text, it was easy to do this in Ruby — just open a file and start writing, without needing to link any binary code. It would be similar using python in blender, with no possibility of raising GPL-related questions.

It would be more complicated to integrate into blender at runtime, though.

[Author]

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