Hi, So, lately there's been a lot of FBX-related issues reported to our tracker. Most of those are either: - Known (half-)broken things (like cameras/lights orientation issues), over which I do not intend to spend more time, since those are not critical features to support imho. - Broken corner-cases in an area that globally works rather well (thinking about skeletons here). - Mysterious third-party applications-related issues (scaling, skeletons again, etc.), that is, bugs that show with one app but not another.
I think later point is a good demonstration that FBX itself is a failure and a dead horse - if even rather big and serious companies like Unreal or Unity cannot get a reliable FBX importer working using official FBX SDK, then how are we supposed to do it without even that SDK? Further more: - In past two years a lot of time and energy was invested (lost) in FBX. - </rant> I’m just dead sick of that format, of hitting any possible table corner when trying to walk my way in that non-sensible pitch black box, etc. </rant> - Knowledge I gained of this format and its evolution is **not** encouraging at all (stupid things like supporting two different and complex transform systems [3DS max and Maya ones, btw ;) ], a very weird inconsistency at binary level, etc.). I do not have any feeling this is a sane format, nor that it is evolving in a sane direction. It seems to be defined a bit as needs arise, piling up new stuff over old ones, etc. To summarize: no clear design behind it, and a very dirty way of handling new versions of it. So I would claim to stop relying on and developing it. It would not mean we just remove it from Blender, but think it’s time to switch to something more modern and open - am aware of at least to possible alternatives, which could even be quite complementary. I) glTF Promoted by Khronos group (https://www.khronos.org/gltf), it aims at being the open exchange format for games (from simple asset to complete scene description). Think it’s still very new stuff, not much widely used yet, but it seems to have some support from several major companies (including Microsoft and even - rofl - Autodesk, see http://gltf.autodesk.io/). II) USD Promoted by Pixar (http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/), it aims at being some kind of generic pipeline format for CG studios (it also has integration of Alembic e.g.). I have no idea of its acceptance currently, but sounds like it could be a valuable option for our 2.8 'pipeline/inter-application exchange' goal? (as a side note, interesting to see that those two have a similar approach, they are not monolithic files but rather a combination of binary data and textual descriptions…) Anyway, those are very early reflections, would like to get your feelings about those two formats/projects (or others you may have in mind! ;) ), but I’m feeling much more enthusiast at the idea of spending time on modern, open-designed (or at least, open-specified) formats, than on piece of proprietary crap! Again, even if we end up deciding we stop trying to fully support FBX as our main exchange format, it would keep being supported in its current status at least for one or two years - just I would not try to add support for new versions (2016 one seems to have some incompatibilities with our code already), nor would try to understand and fix more stuff in that format. And that’s a long enough mail, thanks for reading it! Bastien _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
