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

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

In IRC devs mentioned  3dviewr.com as good collada reference. Although  
it's not official...
I think it would be a cool target for Khronos to expand their  
conformance suite with an open source (opencollada) viewer.

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands

On 19 Aug, 2011, at 13:19, Campbell Barton wrote:

> 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
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