(Another) Zelda Ripping Project!

[JamesO2]

@Alvare - I did notice that the vertex alpha blending doesn't seem to be preserved when importing into Blender 3.0

Blender doesn't import them. There's a patch to fix it but it's not moving very quickly.

Ah, so it is an issue with the collada importer then. From what I do know of Blender, basically every feature, importer, etc, is internally handled as an "add-on" written in python. So it shouldn't be too difficult to modify the collada importer to support one extra vertex channel. I'll look into the patch you linked and see what I can figure out from it.

If its anything like any other add-ons I've modified before, patching is as simple as copy/pasting the relevant code snippet into the right py file.

EDIT: Dang, it looks like the collada mesh importer is code is written in c++, so it would have to be compiled into the main Blender program I assume. That's a bit beyond my scope of knowledge.

Its weird because most of the other importers are written as python add-ons (obj, fbx, stl, gltf, etc), and can even be disabled in preferences.

EDIT 2: Ok, so the collada importer is actually a strange case -- it basically is the only exporter/importer not written in python, and there's a whole article written on the Blender website on why this is a special case, and also why collada is weird in Blender, and why this c++ importer is a clunky approach. And apparently they've been wanting to replace the collada code entirely for some years now, but just no ones gotten around to doing it: https://code.blender.org/2016/10/the-collada-case/

EDIT 3: I looked a little further, and there was a python collada importer in development years ago here: https://github.com/skrat/bpycollada
And it looks like a relatively recent continuation (2.8+ compatible) was continued here: https://github.com/ldo/blender_pycollada_importexport

I haven't tested it yet, but I'm posting it here partly as a note to myself for later, and for anyone interested in testing it.