free 3d gfx export plugin targeting SEGA Saturn

People who had a look into homebrew games available for SEGA Saturn may have wondered why only very few of them use 3d graphics. And almost all of these feature only very simple 3d models.

One main reason for that is the difficult toolflow needed to convert 3d data to Saturn format. The conversion is error prone, covers multiple tools (some of them windows-only), with every tool having it's own bugs and limitations.
Once you started assigning Saturn specific polygon attributes, you can't just go back the toolchain and change the geometry without having to redo all the work on polygon attributes.

But that was then.
For Blender, a free cross-platform and open-source 3D modeling program, capable to import a lot of common 3D file formats through plugins using it's python API,
there is now a new plugin available, which allows a 3D scene, including textures and gouraud shading tables, to be exported to SEGA Saturn format!

This is already the 3rd release of the plugin and though further updates will follow, this one can already be considered to be way better than the "traditional" methods. This script was created for my entry to the SEGA Saturn Coding Contest (C4 - 2006) and it is released in the hope, that it will enable other participants to easily use 3d graphics, too.

Have a look at the original topic for detailed info!

Download and view Screenshots via Comments

Wow! This is fantastic! I wish something like that would be available for Dreamcast too... :)

Really good job Rockin'-B :) Hey people here join the contest!!! Everybody can manage to dev something thanks to Rockin's tutorial here :

http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn-saturngametutorial.html

That is very awesome RockinB! Well done and thanks for sharing with us! :)

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Originally Posted by Christuserloeser

Wow! This is fantastic! I wish something like that would be available for Dreamcast too... :)

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Indeed, I would love to someday see something similar for the Sega Dreamcast!

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Originally Posted by Mark30001

Indeed, I would love to someday see something similar for the Sega Dreamcast!

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There is no need to. Since for Dreamcast, there exists an OpenGL compatible gfx library (KGL, also supported by Chui's SDL driver), you should be able to use the same toolflow for gfx as when developing an Open GL game for Windows/Linux/MacOS X.

On Saturn instead, there is the SGL, SBL and also some homebrew libraries. Of those, when it comes to 3D graphics, the most powerful and easy to use library is the SGL, which is not directly compatible with OpenGL or whatever. I could possibly add SBL output, if it should be requested by someone, someday...


A unique and powerful feature of the plugin is, that it generates the textures (through resampling) automatically, as it is required for sprite based drawing gfx architectures, like the SEGA Saturn and a lot of other systems of that time. These systems don't implement texturing by using UV coordinates (e.g. a polygon face gets a certain area of a texture image assigned), instead, each textured face gets it's assigned rectangular texture image applied completely.

These rectangular texture images are generated automatically, taking a lot of work from the designer, even compared to when using the 3DEditor, which supports that similarly (but not as good as the plugin), too..