Grease Pencil

Armory Engine Haxe
1

Lubos

I tried out the Iron examples. Looking through the source code of Iron, I found a reference to Grease Pencil and I am very curious. As I understand it, to create 2D in Iron I could pass in a “blend” file with Grease Pencil data or does it use another format. I found Mystery of the Blend but it’s not simple, is that what you work with?
Really I am wondering if it would be feasible to create a Grease Pencil from SVG path data and where I would find details of how to get the data into a suitable format to use with the Grease Pencil data class.

Also I noticed the models are in “arm” format is it easy to convert something like the monkey obj 3d model into an “arm” file? I am not against buying Armory and using Blender at some stage, just wanted to explore Iron first as I am not familiar with Blender but I am with Haxe and with some as3 3D engines.

I do remember seeing obj and similar parsers in your repositories is it simple to connect them to Iron.

Many thanks

Nanjizal.

2

Hello @Nanjizal_net! Sorry I just got to this now.

Yes, Iron and Armory is running on the custom “arm” format to handle all the data. The reason for this is to make sure data are in the exact state needed. This ensures everything runs as fast as possible (and leaves the door open for more optimizations / features).

In Armory this does not matter since Blender imports most of the formats just fine and the conversion happens behind the scenes. For Iron alone it’s a bit worse - you would have to manually export the data using the Blender exporter. I am thinking of building a tool to automate this. Connecting OBJ parser directly would also work, but is not yet implemented.

The SVG path sounds doable but quite tough I think. You would have to import SVG into Blender, convert that into Grease Pencil and finally export that into Iron using the arm format. Could be interesting though!