[Community Fork] Blender 4.x/5.0 Compatible Version Available

[elasticdotventures]

👋 Community Announcement

Hi Phobos team! I wanted to inform the community about a Blender 4.x/5.0 compatible fork that may be useful for users who need to work with modern Blender versions.

🔗 Repository

https://github.com/elasticdotventures/phobos-4.0

📋 Background

With Blender 4.x introducing the new extension system and several breaking API changes, the original Phobos addon needed significant updates to work properly. Since there hasn't been active development on Blender 4.x compatibility in the main repository, I created a community fork to address this need.

✨ What's Been Done

Blender 4.x/5.0 Compatibility

• ✅ Full support for Blender 4.2+ extension system
• ✅ Proper namespace handling (bl_ext.UserRepository.phobos_4)
• ✅ Clean installation via Blender's native Extensions manager
• ✅ Tested and working in Blender 4.5 and 5.0

Integrated Community PRs

To reduce fragmentation, this fork has integrated several outstanding pull requests:

• PR Some fixes to pre_v2.1.0 #392 - Blender 4.x compatibility (by @lights0123)
• PR Blender .dae import issue #391 - Additional Blender 4.x updates
• PR URDF Import Error #390 - Export improvements
• Various bug fixes from other contributors

Technical Improvements

• Complete import refactoring for extension namespace compatibility
• Fixed resource path resolution (removed pkg_resources dependency)
• Improved error handling with diagnostic logging
• Module cache management for reliable updates
• Proper separation of phobos.common.defs and phobos.blender.defs

🎯 Purpose of This PR

This PR is informational only - not intended to be merged.

The purpose is to:

1. Inform the community about the availability of a Blender 4.x compatible version
2. Provide a reference for users searching for Blender 4.x support
3. Credit the original team and acknowledge that this is a community fork
4. Reduce duplicate efforts by centralizing Blender 4.x work

📦 Installation

Users can install from:

• Releases page
• Direct download of phobos_4.zip
• Install via Blender 4.x Extensions manager

🙏 Credits

This work builds directly on:

• The excellent original Phobos codebase by DFKI RIC
• Community contributions from various PRs
• Blender 4.x compatibility work by multiple contributors

💭 Future Direction

I'm open to:

• Merging this work back into the main repository if desired
• Continuing as a separate community fork
• Collaborating with the original team on Blender 4.x support
• Any other approach the team prefers

📞 Questions?

Feel free to reach out via:

• This PR discussion
• Issues on the fork repository
• GitHub discussions

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Note: Full details, documentation, and credits are in the BLENDER_4X_FORK.md file included in this PR.

Thank you for creating and maintaining Phobos - it's an invaluable tool for the robotics community! 🤖

[GF-Huang]

[malter]

Hi community,

unfortunately the last maintainers of Phobos left our institute, so we had a phase with very limited support. But we found a new team that will continue the maintenance and further development.
At the moment we merged all changes for Blender >= 4 into the master branch and are testing and bug fixing the master to create a new working release.

We strongly appreciate the development on the fork and would love to merge it back into our repo. It would be a huge help for us, if you could bundle your development into different pull requests, so that we don't have to review and merge all changes at once. We are mainly interested into pull request that extend the functionality or the adaptations to the new install process. Simple bug fixes to the new blender api might already be done in our repo.

Concerning the roadmap:

• We are planing to separate the phobos_core and the blender plugin. The core can also be used without blender to load / maintain urdfs. Which we did for instance in a CI converting cad exports automatically into urdf models with different complexity.
• By separating the core, we would also refactor the source, we found some architectural designs where we see potential for a cleaner structure.
• We also use the phobos-core to combine multiple URDFs (for instance a robot arm with a mobile base)
• We could also think of a much simpler front end to create the robot models. We used Blender in the past mainly to reduce the complex meshes we got from the CAD software. And since we knew Blender pretty well, we integrated Phobos to directly export the URDF. However, with a simpler front end, one might not have to learn Blender to create an URDF based on some meshes. Extracting correct link positions from a mesh might be a show stopper here, since Blender provides great tools for that and we don't plan to reimplement vertices selection and mesh operators to calculate a center point or similar. (just brainstorming)