I have to say I wanted to jump for joy. I followed the instructions given to me by demi over at the Multiverse forums. It took me awhile to digest his instructions but I finally got it. Not his fault. It was all me.

I was working on some modeling in Blender yesterday and figured out some issues. I will pass these on to you so maybe it help you get the collision you want.

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This was a small victory for me and for this project because now I can properly convey how this process works to anyone else on the project that might create or be working with model using Blender.

Here’s an overview of what I did.

I took the dome model and created individual boxes or rectangles and placed them in the location of each segment of wall in the dome. You can see the collision volumes in red.

Collision Volumes

Each individual object was named mvcv_obb_ as seen below. The “mvcv” stands for “Multiverse Collision Volume” and the “obb” is the designator for a bounding area box. In this example the object was called mvcv_obb_Tube_01_08.

Collision Volume Naming

Now after that I had to embed a small dummy object for each collision volume within the area inside or near that volume. This one was called Tube_01_08. It was just a tiny box (See below). The purpose is to give the collision volume a fixed object to reference back to. I tried originally to create the volumes and reference them back to the dome object but that didn’t work. As Demi shared, this was the only way to make it work using Blender.

Collision Volume Dummy

Collision Volume Naming

Now after each was placed and named, the whole object (the dome, the dummy objects and the collision volumes) were exported from Blender using the Collada 1.4 export tool.

All Volumes in Place

Colloda Export

After that, I had to run the resulting *.dae file through the multiverse conversion tool per the Multiverse documentation. The conversion created a mesh object, the physics object and the material file. I modified the material file to match the template file I am using (another discussion). The physics file had to be edited to remove the “mvcv_obb_” reference. It is not automatically removed as would be the case when converting via the Collada export tool using 3dsMax. I made that change using my favorite text editor, Notepad++. (See below)

Renaming of Physics references

Now, after a process of moving the files over to my server and booting up Multiverse, I was pleasantly surprised to see the collision volumes on the model. I used a little trick available in the Multiverse World Browser designed to view the volumes in development (CTRL-H).

Collision Volumes Visible

The Volumes invisible

Of course, I had to run into the building from all angles to make sure the collision volumes worked and yes, they did! Bust open the champaign! I was pleased that I could stand in the dome and out of the upcoming weather too (which I just imagined was coming).

Out of the weather

Again, I want to thank Demi for all his help. Now that this model is done, I can start porting the rest of the initial work done by our team of volunteers into the Postmoderna Project Demo.