From BlenderWiki
23rd May
So Exams finished, It was long and exhausting. Finally, can start work on the project. The wiki pages were made during the exams. Added some more tweaks and sections to the wiki. The feedback from the blenderartists thread is encouraging. The problems mentioned in the thread will be answered. A solid user and testers base will be a huge boost to the project. First must get up to date on the current situation. I've missed some important updates to the COLLADA branch. Gaia Clary is handling some important improvements to the COLLADA section. Made contact with Gaia and discussed about the projects somewhat.
28th May
Last few days, did a bit of analyzing. Identified important subtasks while going through the constraint animation fundamentals in blender. Initially decided to code support for tracking constraints animations. Created a simple scene with an empty an a sphere which tracks to that empty target. After animating the target and exporting, as previously no effort for constrained animations was implemented, only the animation of the target was exported. So on reimporting the .dae the spheres animation and constraints were not reflected.
To overcome this there are two options possible, one is to have export constraints parameters in a blender profile, and the other is to sort of bake the animation of the sphere and export another animation curve for that. Gaia Suggested to have both of these implemented inside <extra> tags. <technique_COMMON> and <technique_blender> elements can be used to achieve this. So with my first commit for GSoC this year, committed an initial attempt export constraint data within a blender profile in <extra> tag within node elements. Objects which have constraints are checked from the Object->constraints ListBase.
31st May
A busy week, with two project deadlines from university coming in the next week. So couldn't keep up with GSoC work as expected. Since exporting of constraint animations involves baking the constraints to the objects and exporting the new curves, had a look at blenderpython scripts to bake constraints. So they can be converted to C++ code and then can be used to automate exporting of constraints. But it seems more challenging than expected. Maybe a different approach will be needed to bake constraints. Although the theories can be used as in the python script, the algorithm may need changes.
