[Bf-committers] Collada importer/exporter kickout

[François T.]

I'm probably a bit too late for the fight and tried to read all the thread
for this (there is several email with different subjects).
I do understand the complexity with collada, and yet I don't understand all
the issue you mention, but i'll trust you for this. Two years ago I wrote a
simple LUA DAE importer with my two cents of programming knowledge for a
propriatry engine we had in my company. I did it myself because the
engineer who did it in C was having somehow same troubles as you guys seems
to have with openCollada (yet I don't knwo OC at all). And his importer was
doing a terrible job.
I had nothing to do with complex bones or amarture so I wouldn't know about
that. But my simple LUA importer were dealing with scene, camera, lights,
obj, mesh, uv, material and textures and I it was tested with Blender
exporter at the time which was a python script, Max, XSI and Maya and
worked fine in all the cases, so I don't get the issue with vertices order
or whatever (or maybe I just not remember).
I couldn't wrote stuff in C and was only scripting in LUA at the time, so
it was easy for me to write a parser. I think the engineer fail to
understand the basics of the collada structure at first, and since I
couldn't do any C, all his code was useless to me and couldn't change or
enhance it as I wished.
And I also know that collada is so flexible that so many software insert
there own technics and not always the right way. But I think that if this
I/O was pure blender python based code (no dependencies, no external code),
more people (like me) would be able to develop or provide patches rather
than C which is only for a certain elite.
I remember asking at the time why doing this I/O with C in the first place,
I can't remember the reason exactly.

Anyway w/o collada (even though its not working as good as we wish right
now) Blender will get some doors closed to interoperate with other
software, and I know I'm probably the only one in the community who like
that, but its true.
3DS ... :/ .... obj ... very limited... FBX, great format for sure (even
 though I'm not a big fan of it, but the industry love it) we only have
output with it ! no import and eula issue with it as Campbell said... I
have read Alembic somewhere in this thread mention by someone I can't
remember the name. I want to remind him this is a bake  I/O format, no
edition possible afterwards
So question is : if we take of collada, what other better I & O format do
we have instead ?

so +1000 for a python, dependency less from scratch... one feature at the
time with clear, simple and well commented code ! I'm sure many people will
be able to help in the community. But until we have a I/O addon working for
basic features as a complete scene (no animation, no bones, no morph),
please pretty please keep it :/

F.

2012/1/8 skoti <skoti48 at o2.pl>

> Unfortunately I can not - I tested a month ago one scene and a file
> exported from Blender to 3ds max (reference implementation) and showed
> errors. I no longer have either the file or scene, and detailed
> information is not checked, because the FBX does not interest me.
>
> On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 03:45, Campbell Barton wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 12:03 AM, skoti<skoti48 at o2.pl>  wrote:
> >> I know Collada importer / exporter is problematic (I wrote an importer
> >> for my engine and I know that everything in the Collada can be stored in
> >> N different ways).
> >>
> >> - If you want to use the model in Second Life / Google Earth, you have
> >> to use Collada, if you want to use models in engines WebGL/Flash3D
> >> practically have to use Collada (is there any web engine with FBX
> >> importer?), Most game engines use Collada for importing data (support
> >> for FBX a few). FBX exporter also has bugs. Well, that FBX is in a
> >> blender, but it is not usually an option for people using Collada.
> > Can you report these bugs please?
> >
> > I'm no great fan of FBX/Autodesk with their idiotic EULA, but as
> > maintainer of FBX export I rather not have it be buggy.
> >
> > Note that FBX has similar issues as collada, which is that different
> > applications support different parts of the FBX spec - so Lightwave
> > and Maya for example complain when importing non uniform scaled bones
> > from blender for EG because they don't support it.
> > So you cant assume just because a single application chokes on a
> > blender FBX model that it is a blender bug for sure.
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Bf-committers at blender.org
> > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
> >
>
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-- 
____________________
François Tarlier
www.francois-tarlier.com
www.linkedin.com/in/francoistarlier