From TDN

Contents 1 Under Construction 2 General 3 Textures 4 Animation 5 Modeling

Under Construction

The Blender DTS FAQ is currently in the works. If you have anything to add, please do.

General

What is the Torque Exporter Plugin for Blender?
As described by the author, James Urquhart, it is "A set of Python scripts that allows one to export Blender Scenes to Torque .DTS Shapes. The scripts also provide a DTS SDK written in Python, useful for writing exporters for other Python-scripted modeling tools." If you are planning to use Blender for creating 3D content for your TGE game, you will definitely need this.

Where do I get the DTS exporter for Blender?
The newest version of the exporter can always be found here on the Blender DTS Exporter project site.
The Release system on the exporter project site is currently broken. Until it is fixed, the exporter can be downloaded here:DTSExporter_095.zip. The latest point releases of the exporter, containing up-to-the minute bug fixes and new features can be found in this thread

How do I Install the DTS exporter for Blender?
There is a guide on TDN for installing it right here.

Where can I find an explanation of the exporter's user interface options?
An overview of the exporter user interface can be found here.

I need help with the Blender DTS exporter, but I can't find the answer in this FAQ or the rest of TDN. Can someone help me please?
Check out the "DTS Exporter: Blender" forum section on GarageGames site for help. When you do solve the problem, we strongly encourage you to add your solution as a contribution to TDN (please).

Textures

Why won't my shape's texture show up in-game or in the Show Tool?
First off, make sure your texture size is in powers of 2 (e.g., 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512), which is the standard for any game engine. Also, in Blender's Material window in the Shading panel, the name of the material itself should be the same as the filename, excluding the file extension (e.g., MA: NameOfImageFile). Once your shape is exported to DTS, place the image file for your texture in the same or parent directory of the .DTS file.

I can see right through parts of my model from certain angles in Torque. Help me.
Textures only show up on one side of a face in a mesh. Make sure your backfaces are not facing outwards. To do this in Blender, find the offending faces, select them in edit mode and Flip Normals (Keys W 9). It will be very difficult to spot the backfaces in Edit mode, but they are a lot more visible in UV Face Select mode (you can select the faces in UV Face Select and Tab back and forth between edit mode). Also make sure your mesh object isn't set to double-sided.

In Blender, joining two mesh objects together (e.g., mirrored duplicates) sometimes causes the normals on part of the new (joined) object to flip. You may have to flip them back if that is the case.

Animation

My animation looks fine in Blender, but it's all messed up in Torque. What's wrong?
You're not alone. This usually happens the first time most artists try exporting animations from Blender to Torque. The real culprit is the transformations on the objects, in which Torque takes into consideration even though it may look right in Blender. There should be a list of things to check for before doing ANY animation in Blender.

• Reset roll angles (Ctrl+N) on the armature in Edit mode before starting any animation.
• You may view the Transformations window (N key) to view the current Locs, Rots, and Sizes on the 3 axes of your object.
• Apply size/rot (Ctrl+A) to objects so they are all 1 and 0 respectively, or reset size (Alt+S) and reset rot (Alt+R) in object mode. You may have to move things back into place in some cases. This affects child objects, so it's best to unparent objects first (in some cases keeping transformations when unparenting).
  
• If you are ready to animate, start off with a simple test, or a Root animation to export and test it before making all your animations that may not work and which may have to be done over again.

Here are a couple GarageGames forum threads of real problems being solved on this topic, which go in more detail. One Two

NOTE: As of version 0.90 of the exporter, the above advice no longer applies. The exporter has been fixed so that it now takes all armature transforms into account. If you experience problems related to any of the armature transform properties described above they should be reported to the maintainers via the Blender forums or exporter bug tracker.

How do I make my animations loop in Torque?
In Blender, under the Anim window of the Scene panel (F10), there are Sta: and End: values for the current animation. Set the End value to the last frame number of your animation. Now, when you press Alt+A, your animation will loop in Blender. When you export out to DTS, go into the sequences section of the exporter's configure window, and select "Cyclic" for each animation you want to export as a loop. Your animation should now loop in Torque.

Modeling

Why is everything backwards when I put it in Torque?
Currently (or at the time of this writing), Torque's DTS and Blender seem to have the Y axis inverted from each other. For example, when modeling a character in Blender, your character should have its back facing the front view when you export to DTS, otherwise the players in the game will be all backwards. We'll have to do this until the Blender DTS exporter fixes this.

Parts of my model are going right off the screen in Torque. What's going on?
This will happen if you have vertices which are not in a vertex group. If you've edited your mesh and added new vertices after the rigging and skinning process, you'll need to assign them to vertex groups.