On 1/28/2013 9:29 AM, Stefan Andersson wrote:
Hello Everyone,
Something that is bothering me, and has been bothering me for a long
while, is the constant use of binary files in Softimage.
3.) scn files
Would be most helpful if this also could have THE OPTION of being ascii.
--
*Stefan Andersson | /Digital Janitor/*
blog <http://sanders3d.wordpress.com> | showreel
<http://vimeo.com/sanders3d>| twitter <http://twitter.com/sanders3d> |
LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/sanders3d> | cell: +46-73-6268850
| skype:sanders3d
Second that!
Why?
I've been writing out Maya .ma files for almost 12 years. That would
have been 14 years except in 98 and 99 I did not have the foresight to
understand that Maya's binary .mb files might need to be edited. On rare
occasions we ran into scene files that would get corrupted or otherwise
take a mind of their own. ASCII .ma files could be edited and the scene
resurrected, an activity that occurred more frequently as the files got
really large.
Other reasons? Old scene files(decade old), and which were not
corrupted, but had old texture file links that were no longer valid
could be edited to relink the textures to their new location. Old .ma
file, new file server, Perl script, no problem.
The loss of hard disk space and extra time to load .ma files became
trade-offs that were well worth the investment. As an added advantage
interrogating the .ma scene structure yielded vast amounts of
interesting information about Maya internals and structure. It was after
all nothing but a huge Mel file.
An example of a significant benefit? I once wrote a material file
converter for Wavefront TAV .mtl files to Maya. Something Alias
Wavefront never created...go figure. I used a .ma file to decipher what
the materials should look like in Maya and converted the .mtl files
straight to .ma. Without the ASCII scene information from the .ma file
it would have been practically impossible to accomplish.
With this habit somewhat ingrained, I have often wondered what a
Softimage scene file would look like in ASCII. I would welcome this
capability in Softimage.
Going back even farther, I had my own database management tools written
in Perl for Softimage 3D back in the day. So having ascii access to
dsprojectinfo would also be useful. As would the other files. Granted
I can understand the performance issues related to having some of these
files as ascii, but each should be optional.
Joey Ponthieux
LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES)
Mymic Technical Services
NASA Langley Research Center
____________________________________________________________
Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and
do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.
