SLender

SLender is a Blender extension for managing Second Life and OpenSim LOD assets with explicit metadata instead of brittle collection-only conventions.

Current Status

• Extension-first package with blender_manifest.toml
• Targeted at Blender 4.2 LTS and verified on Blender 5.1.0
• GLB is the primary export path
• Collada is kept only as a temporary compatibility backend when Blender exposes it
• Legacy scenes can be migrated from the old HighLOD / MediumLOD / Physics style collection workflow

What Changed

The original add-on was written around Blender 2.8-era practices:

• add-on directory config files
• global context helpers
• selection-mutating export
• collection and object naming as the only source of truth

The current refactor replaces that with:

• Scene.slender as canonical scene state
• Object.slender as canonical asset metadata
• explicit asset_id, part_key, and lod_role
• export backends for GLB and temporary Collada compatibility
• validation and migration services that are independent of viewport collection layout

Included Tools

• Metadata tagging for High / Medium / Low / Lowest / Physics roles
• Basic LOD duplication from selection
• Physics cube generation
• Asset validation
• Land Impact calculation helper
• GLB export (with timed auto-export option)
• Mesh-name cleanup
• UV map cleanup
• Simple SL-oriented material setup helper

Workflow (most steps are optional - especially for simple single-part assets)

1. Tag mesh objects as managed.
2. Set asset_id to group parts that should export together.
3. Set part_key to the stable per-part export name.
4. Set lod_role for each object.
5. Run validation.
6. Export GLB.

SL naming rules are still preserved on export:

• High: unsuffixed
• Medium: _LOD2
• Low: _LOD1
• Lowest: _LOD0
• Physics: _PHYS

Those suffixes now live in preferences and are treated as export compatibility, not as the canonical authoring model.

Legacy Migration

If you have an older scene:

• the extension can read the legacy config/SLender.cfg once to seed preferences
• Migrate Legacy Scene scans the old collection names and suffixes
• detected objects are converted into metadata-driven managed assets

The migration defaults each legacy object to its own asset group. Multipart assets can then be regrouped by editing asset_id.

Notes

• The old collection-visibility UI was removed during the modernization pass.
• The repo keeps the old legacy config file only for migration input; runtime state is now stored in Blender preferences and extension user storage.
• Public extension packaging is now the mainline path. There is no separate legacy add-on track.

Releases

• Build Preview Extension runs on pull requests, pushes to master, and manual workflow runs.
• Preview packages are renamed to include -preview-<sha>, for example slender-0.2.0-preview-1a2b3c4.zip, and are uploaded only as workflow artifacts.
• Release Extension runs only when pushing a tag such as v0.2.0.
• The release workflow verifies that the tag matches version in blender_manifest.toml before publishing slender-0.2.0.zip to the GitHub release for that tag.