[Bf-committers] yafray might be dropped from Blender?

[erwin at erwincoumans.com]

Rich data exchange between tools is exactly what COLLADA 
(http://collada.org) is designed for. It is an XML based standard in 
Blender, Maya, Max, Lightwave and plenty of other tools. 

COLLADA supports all primitives, shaders, rigid body physics data, extension 
mechanism. The plugins for Max and Maya are open source, and there are 
tinyxml/libxml based tools like COLLADA-DOM to read/write files. 

The problem with standards is not so much coming up with a specification, 
but rather getting people to use that, rather then their own (not invented 
here syndrome). 

If you your XML specification documented, it would be good to pass it to the 
COLLADA folks, so they can check if there is anything missing in their 
standard. 

I'm happy to discuss this over direct email,
Erwin 

 


Arne Schmitz writes: 

> If we could make a 'standard' XML format for exporting, this might make it easier 
> for other tools to use that standard. I think this would be an orthogonal 
> concept to the other export tools, which export only parts like models (off, 
> obj, 3ds,...), or Verse (networking) or even the infamous Render-API. The XML