Hi Guys! I've been following blender development for a long time. I work as consultant in game development and worked with several companies, providing technology for publishing downloadable games for PC, consoles and phone/tablets. I also published several open source libraries and apps. I work close with companies during all the development process, and that includes artists. I've always used Collada, first with the now discontinued FCollada and now OpenCollada. Collada support for 3DSMax and Maya has always been rock solid and I've never experienced problems using it. Now, you guys did an extremely good work with Blender. I've never ever seen so many artists in the game development industry so eager to use blender and commenting how the 2.5 interface allowed them to finally try it, and notice how their productivity increased tenfold. Thanks to the 2.5 work, it seems there really is a lot of people willing to use Blender for game development.
But Collada support is just not there, year after year there is some work done but left unfinished, be it for GSOC or individually. Basic geometry works, but more complex stuff such as baking IK or constraints is not supported and has never been. So It's impossible to use Blender for very simple tasks such as animating a character, blend shapes, or export an object that follows a curve, thus alienating a large amount of potential users. Collada support was supposedly going to be completed in this GSOC, but it seems none of these issues were even worked on, the developers and student working on it did not seem to have a clear direction on what to do, and at the end, the only "relevant" changes on the collada exporter are strange features such as animating light colors. I mean, it's as if work on Collada is not even taken seriously by the community. I know that Blender is volunteer work, that volunteers mostly work in the areas that motivate them. I guess Collada is complex, difficult and not very motivating, and I guess the Blender Foundation does not have the resources to cost the development of it. But at this point I think it's weird that the most relevant open 3D creative package does not properly support the most relevant open 3D exchange format. I am constantly having to recommend my clients to force their artists to continue using propertary software, against their will to use Blender and this doesn't feel any good. I even considered getting donations from companies to add proper Collada support to Blender, but after seeing how that worked for the Illusoft exporter, which was always broken, unfinished and never really integrated as core, it sounds like making clients waste money. So, to attempt being more constructuve, shouldn't it be possible for the Blender Foundation to work together with Khronos on this? (read: get funding) Khronos seems to be doing a great job developing and promiting OpenGL, GLES and WebGL and OpenCollada already has paid developers. So why not extending support to Blender? cheers Juan Linietsky _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
