[Bf-committers] Introduction and Request

[Campbell Barton]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 12:15 AM, Juan Linietsky <reduzio at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi! My name is Juan Linietsky and I work as consultant for many game
> development studios. Usually, I provide tools, technology and support to
> them as part of my job.
> I noticed that more and more artists in studios are pushing for Blender as
> an alternative to commercial tools such as 3DS max, both because it's free
> and they really love the tool.
> However, Blender still has a huge drawback in game development, which is the
> very poor Collada support. I have no doubts that the support in 2.5 series
> improved, but even though the artists i work with are very enthusiastic,
> support is still not at the same level they find in autodesk software using
> OpenCollada or ColladaMaya.
>
> I may have to start working on a Playstation 3 project with a company soon
> that will requiere them to use almost all the functionality present in
> Collada (like skinning, morphing, animation, etc), and the artists would
> really like to use Blender 2.5 and contribute to test it and use it in a
> real world scenario. I'm sure that they can provide very valuable testing
> and feedback to Blender 2.5 development and help make Collada support very
> solid. However, I'd really like to know if I can count on the Blender
> development community to receive feedback and help fix the issues that will
> arise in this real-world-usage scenario of Blender 2.5.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Juan Linietsky

If you cant get collada working well, Blender also exports to FBX.
Admittedly FBX format is proprietary but its been used quite a bit
with unity3d and tested to work with other apps like maya, cinema4d
and motion-builder.
If there are bugs in the tracker I try to fix them.
Limitations of blenders support are export only and it bakes the
IK's/Constraints to paths so its not great for editing animations
externally, just playing.

See: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.4/Py/Scripts/Export/FBX