Out of curiosity, how many of you have data from Softimage|3D you'd like to
get out and into something else, even if just for archiving purposes?
After spending many weeks looking at my options and tinkering with various
avenues to get data out of Softimage|3D, I've hit a crossroads where I have
to decide how ambitious I want to get with this little project. I can cut
all the corners in the book and do only what I need to satisfy my immediate
problem, or, I can take a more formal approach so it can be used by others.
But before doing that I'd like to know if there's anybody out there that
would benefit from such an endeavor?
Current implementation is a plugin which runs inside of Softimage|3D 3.9.2,
but can possibly be compiled for other versions as I have one or two on
hand.
The plugin will dump a scene to a single XML file so data isn't
scattered in many files as Softimage|3D did. I chose XML for two reasons:
1) text format means you'll be able to exhume and/or convert the data
wherever needed should the need arise without having to guess how the file
data is structured, and 2) there are a bazillion XML DOM parsers out there
making it easy for someone to write their own importer to application of
choice. The data will likely be bloated compared to other file structures,
but that's OK since this is intended for archive purposes, not editing.
If interested, let me know.
thanks,
Matt
