[Bf-committers] Blender and Collada support. Does it matter?

[Campbell Barton]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:45 PM, Knapp <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well that was basically the whole point of my post - people are serious about Collada, many need it, and certainly funded dev on it must be possible. Was mostly a reaction to you saying that funding the work wouldn't work.
>>
>> So, as said, by all means talk with Khronos, but if that route is slow or otherwise difficult, let's not let that stop us getting improved code earlier.
>>
>>> Juan
>>
>> ~Toni
>
> As a hobby user I am finding myself stuck because of Collada issues
> also. I write games with Panda 3d. Blender used to have an "egg"
> exporter but now it does not for the 2.5 line. Panda is switching to
> the Collada importer but they are also being a bit slow about it.
> Between all this I am stuck not being able to full do what I would
> like to do. My current option is exporting to X format and then
> converting to egg format but loosing stuff like animation.
>
> For more info into this problem area between Blender and Panda 3d:
> https://www.panda3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11087
>
> Having a solid Blender Collada will make sure that in the future the
> Blender -> Panda 3d pipeline is solid. It makes me very nervous seeing
> all the Collada complaints and also seeing Panda3d be so slow in
> getting a 2.5 pipeline with Blender.
>
> So to sum it up; hobbyist need solid Collada too.
>
> --
> Douglas E Knapp

Hi - note that this mail focuses mainly on export issues.

For some reason neither GSOC projects we had so far have had exporting
a skinned mesh (animated character run-cycle for example), as a
priority.

Apparently this works at some level but take a typical run-cycle (with
IK and constraints) blender and export to collada, and its a no go -
scrambled vertices's when I tested once a while ago, but I've heard
Maya's support is also not good so, it could have been a bug there.

To me this would be one of the first things to attempt to get working
after basic camera, lamp, mesh support - for export at least.

For FBX Its something I tested early on and had users help out making
sure it worked correctly in different applications.

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


So far I haven't spend much time with Collada but the few times I have
tried to troubleshoot bugs in blender support  I couldn't even find a
good program to view the models in - and I think this is part of the
problem for development - perhaps there is one and I just didn't come
across it - collada web viewer didn't run on my system, there was some
other download-able viewer that was quite old IIRC.

- For FBX there is a demo of MotionBuilder which is a good reference
since they invented the format, Unity3D good for testing too.

- For X3D I use view3dscene, h3d, freewrl sometimes whiteDune.

But for Collada I didn't manage to find a viewer that is a defacto
standard for testing and properly supporting most collada's features
properly.

This is really important IMHO because one can spend hours (or days),
troubleshooting various combinations or
animation/object/armature/deformation/scaled
objects/non-uniform-scales's/parenting.. etc - so if its the viewer at
fault - or its not accepted as being a correct implementation, theres
not much motivation to painstakingly go over the code to ensure the
files load properly in an external app.

-- 
- Campbell