Import - support for shape type "serialized"

[meierhofer08]

Would it be possible to implement support for "serialized" shape types?

This would help with importing many older Mitsuba scenes still containing serialized shapes.

[rtabbara]

Hi @meierhofer08 ,

I think it's certainly possible, but in contrast to the other formats such as PLY, OBJ, we can't leverage Blender's internal routines to directly convert the data into a Blender mesh. So unfortunately it't not as straight-forward.

One potential workaround would be to first load your serialized meshes in Mitsuba and then you can write them out as PLY files. Subsequently you could modify your scene to use the generated PLY meshes instead.

[meierhofer08]

Hi @rtabbara,

Thank you for the quick response. The workaround you mention seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. I already tried writing out the serialized meshes as PLY files, but thought this doesn't help me much as the PLY doesn't hold the complete scene description (BSDFs etc.). But subsequently setting the PLY meshes in the original scene XML and then importing into Blender should do the job.