On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 9:52 AM, spatial <[email protected]> wrote: > > > For the COLLADA community Blender is definitely one of the most > > important stakeholders to stop supporting COLLADA would make things in > > DCC exchange even worse. > I agree. Not to mention all those who co use it alongside LW , all of > DAZ products....etc. > > I actually tried to avoid a discussion here since a long time, > but topic is too important. > > First, kicking out collada from blender doesn't help anyone. None of the > "common" interexchange formats is that reliable / support all features. > To have at least a second format as a backup strategy, if a certain > features arent't supported / have some unreliable results, is a "must > have" in every cross application enviroment.
Its frustrating that a lot of this discussion seems to revolve around possible solutions for _other_ people to work on which blender _should_ support. We already tried to support collada and pretty much failed by the looks of it. Kicking out collada helps because it means we don't give users a barely working feature they report bugs about that we can't fix. It helps not to give users crappy software. no? It also helps to move into a branch that motivated people can work on - so this feature can reach some level of quality before moving back into trunk. > And btw, blenders FBX import is, from my experience, still not as > reliable as it should be, to actually replace collada. (sorry, this is > no actual bashing... its already great what has been archived... > especially if you consider that it is allways pain in the ass, to > support such a complex exchange format) again, would be nice to hear some example, even anecdotal as to what isn't working in FBX (assume you mean exporter since we don't have a stable importer). > > We are currently discussing further financing of OpenCOLLADA and will > > spend more time the next months on bugfixing and conformance tests. > > > Sorry to say this, but this is one of the mayor reasons I have to post this: > > Conformance tests do only help a little to 0 > The big _advantage_ fbx has, is a working reference application called maya. FBX was written for Kaydara Motionbuilder, which I used as a reference, Maya support was added later and it still doesn't support all Motionbuilder's rigging options last I tested. There are files written out of blender which work in Motionbuilder and not correctly in Maya. > No conformance test can actually be that foolproof to support all > features and variations. So by this simple unoffical agreement,"if it > doesn't work in maya - it is broken", users and developers have an ideal > platform to discuss errors / find workarounds. This greatly avoids the > "picking in the dark" situation all developers currently face with > collada. Even if a dev doesn't have access to it, in a lot of cases, he > can track down problems reported by users who do provide a simple > screenshot. > > Could this collada reference application be Blender ? > For me this is a very attractive idea, but also, I'm very aware of the fact, > that I'm opening a can of worms I'm actually in no way in the right > position to touch. its possible, but at some point we need to follow a spec that works elsewhere for it to be useful. Otherwise having overly specific blender/collada format runs the risk of nobody adopting it and looses a lot of blender developer time. > Anyway just my 2 cents on this. > chris > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers -- - Campbell _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
