free 3d gfx export plugin targeting SEGA Saturn

December 11th, 2006, 15:29 Posted By: RockinB

People who had a look into homebrew games available for SEGA Saturn may have wondered why only very few of them use 3d graphics. And almost all of these feature only very simple 3d models.

One main reason for that is the difficult toolflow needed to convert 3d data to Saturn format. The conversion is error prone, covers multiple tools (some of them windows-only), with every tool having it's own bugs and limitations.
Once you started assigning Saturn specific polygon attributes, you can't just go back the toolchain and change the geometry without having to redo all the work on polygon attributes.

But that was then.
For Blender, a free cross-platform and open-source 3D modeling program, capable to import a lot of common 3D file formats through plugins using it's python API,
there is now a new plugin available, which allows a 3D scene, including textures and gouraud shading tables, to be exported to SEGA Saturn format!

This is already the 3rd release of the plugin and though further updates will follow, this one can already be considered to be way better than the "traditional" methods. This script was created for my entry to the SEGA Saturn Coding Contest (C4 - 2006) and it is released in the hope, that it will enable other participants to easily use 3d graphics, too.

Have a look at the original topic for detailed info!

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