[Bf-committers] Collada importer/exporter kickout

[Campbell Barton]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 6:57 AM, Sergey Sharybin <sergey.vfx at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As everybody noticed current collada importer/exporter is very buggy which
> seems to make this format almost useless in Blender. And what's much worse
> -- we don't actually have developer who maintains this area.
>
> We discussed this already with Campbell and found that OpenCollada itself
> isn't actually maintaning -- there are only few commits in several months.
> Ofcourse it doesn't mean this library is useless and all bug from our
> tracker is related on that issues, but still.. Maybe the time have come to
> re-think this importer/exporter (investigate if it's possible to fix issues
> in clear way, check if design is good enough -- not sure, haven't touched
> this code deep myself)?
>
> Here's our proposal:
> - Move all collada-related issues into it's own tracker. Like it was done
> with BGE, it might help finding volunteer to fix them. Also, people will
> see that it's not actually core stuff and that it's community-supported.
> - Disable collada in release builds. It's not useable and only seems to be
> making artists disappointed.
>
> More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who
> will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..)
>
> --
> With best regards, Sergey Sharybin
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+1 for immediate creation of Collada tracker and move collada bugs
there (can help with this, it worked well for BMesh).

Other topics can be postponed closer to release, though I'd expect
2.62 would include collada, perhaps we could set some target for the
Collada tracker & call for developers to help out, or disable by
default (actual code removal can be checked on much later if we want
to phase out or move to something else).


My own experience with trying to fix collada bugs has not been great -
the few issues I ran into were either very hard to debug or bugs in
opencollada (which I forwarded to the collada tracker) - just to say
that ~5 or so times I seriously tried to fix some of our collada bugs
and didn't get far.

Maybe this is just bad luck or that I'm not familier enough in this
area, however with our other formats I help maintain - X3D, FBX, 3DS,
OBJ - we're mostly able to keep the tracker at 0 and have a good
history with users submitting fixes when they run into issues or want
better support for features.

OpenCollada issue tracker is at ~95, and only had a few commits in last months.
http://code.google.com/p/opencollada/issues/list
http://code.google.com/feeds/p/opencollada/svnchanges/basic


Since its useful to have basic mesh support for google earth for eg -
just loading models,
I'd be happy to write a python addon to support collada - basic
meshes/uvs/vcols and materials - this could be the basis for others to
add deeper support for the format too.

-- 
- Campbell