BlenderXNA is a project to allow XNA developers to export and incorporate Blender 3D models into their XNA projects. The current status is “unreleased” but I hope to release a proof-of-concept demo for those interested very soon.

Long term plan:

Enable developers to import Blender models in various ways:

• Import into a custom BlenderModel class.

This will be useful for people who want to create their own Content Pipeline implementations from scratch for their own purposes.

• Import directly into an XNA Model class

Useful for the beginner in XNA, who doesn’t really care how the Content Pipeline plug-in works, but just wants to use Blender models in their projects.

In addition to the above, I’d like to produce shaders that allow modellers to set various parameters in Blender and have these also used in XNA itself.

Very long term plan:

To allow baking of hi-res models in Blender for normal mapping, UV mapping, specularity, animation, collision bounding collection, level editing and more - all from within Blender with a one-step export that XNA can use without intermediary tweaking.

Progress

My “Blender and XNA” series will act as a guide explaining the Content Pipeline, parsing input files and creating custom XNA assets from it:

Blender and XNA - Part 1
Blender and XNA - Part 2

As an aside, and to avoid taking the series off-topic, I’ll be posting up progress notes as I wrestle with various issues:

Fun with PIX
More fun with PIX
Even more fun with PIX

Project status

It is at pre-release stage. I will post up an unsupported demo of my progress so far over the next week or so. Once I start working on my longer term plans, there’ll be software packages, guides on how to set them up plus a forum for feedback, feature requests and support.