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Lab 8 - Character Animation with Blender

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Before You Start

You need to have Blender installed on your computer.
You need to have extracted the contents of the Chicken 1.0 Egg Exporter zip file into your “.blender/scripts” folder.
Download and unzip the Lab 8 Asset File into your working directory

Exporting a Model to Panda 3D:
1. Load the model alien.blender into Blender (this is the same model as the one in Tutorial_body.blend from the tutorial we will be following during this lab, except mirroring has already been applied and the normals have been fixed).
2. Make sure you can export the model into Panda 3D. You do that by engaging the Chicken Exporter script from the Scripts Window. When you start Blender, the main screen is split into two windows, a 3D view on top and a panel of buttons below. You can change the contents of each of these windows by clicking on the little icon to the far left in the windows. You'll then get a menu of possible window types (see screenshot). Change the lower window into a Scripts Window using this menu. Now in the Scripts Window, select the Scripts → Export → Chicken 1.0 (.egg)… menu item. In the 3D Window, select the model (it should be outlined in pink to show that it is selected) and in the Scripts Window, make sure the export file path is your working directory and press the Export button (notice that you can toggle the pview button in the exporter to get a Panda 3D preview after export has finished - in the preview, press L to turn on the preview light).
3. Run showalien.py to make sure that your model loads properly into your own Panda 3D python program (notice how the alien is being loaded as an Actor).