Example 811c: Rendering the porcine ventricular model with Blender

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How to make nice model renderings using the professional 3D animation package Blender from Nan.

Image rendered with Blender Image rendered with Blender

This isn't a tutorial on how to use blender (there are plenty of resources on the web already for that), rather an explantion of how to get models from cmiss into Blender. But first the questions everyone asks:

Why bother? Can't you do that in cmgui?
No. Blender is a professional rendering package, cmgui is a model visualisation tool for cmiss - they do different things. Blender is much better for producing nicely rendered images, it has superior lighting and rendering models and supports stuff like bump mapping.

Isn't Maya better for that?
Blender is freely available for any platform even the iPAQ!!!


Blender uses three file formats DXF, VRML, and its own format which uses the extension .blend.
cmgui can export VRML, however the version it exports is not compatible with the version imported by blender. Nan claim this will be rectified in the near future, but for now the following works:

1. Export the model from cmgui as wavefront objects. Each graphical element group will have its own file. Dont export internal faces.
2. Use the obj2wrl script from the San Diego Supercomputer Center to convert each object file (.obj) to a VRML file (.wrl)
3. Open the VRML files in Blender, and join the objects again if necessary.

Bugs
Scaled/oriented glyphs in cmgui loose the scaling and orientation when exported from cmgui. This is a cmgui bug.

Files used by this example are:

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