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

[Peter Amstutz]

Hi Ton,

I agree that the best way to get this done is to get stakeholders to
commit to developing or at least supporting development of Collada
features rather than just complaining about it.  My company is very
small, which means we are disproportionately affected by the Autodesk
tax [1] and very much want to get away from 3DS Max and use Blender
for our workflow, which is mostly character-oriented.  Our prime
interest is in Collada import, so we can export our characters from
3DS Max and import them into Blender without having to completely redo
the rigging and animation.

Our barrier to dedicating resources to work on Blender is that we are
a contractor, so we either need to be able to justify working on
Blender as part of our contracts, or do the work on overhead.  While
1-2 week skunk works projects are fairly easy to slip into the
schedule, I'm pretty sure Collada is a much bigger task that requires
a more significant time commitment.  If there were some other funding
source, it would be much easier to get management on board.

[1] I think Autodesk is the new Microsoft of this decade, at least in
CG.  Does that mean Blender is the new Linux?

- Peter

On 8/19/2011 7:01 AM, Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> Hi Juan,
> 
> At Siggraph I sat down for a meeting with Khronos, and they started
>  with "what can we do for Blender". I mentioned two main issues; 1)
>  OpenGL compliancy (Intel especially) to make vendors give better
>  information what kind of options to avoid or how to bypass it; 2)
>  Collada support, which still fails to deliver up to expectations
> for (more advanced) animation im/export.
> 
> For Collada, Khronos would "look into it". They do seem to have
> some funding opportunities, but it's not common to pay for
> integration really. I'll keep in touch with them on it.
> 
> The main point however; as for most aspects in an open
> de-centralized project like Blender, is that we have to define &
> involve the stakeholders for features well. The responsibility of
> BF or (BI) should be as limited as possible here. It would be much
> more interesting - and beneficial for everyone - if our Collada
> project at least gets involvement from people who directly benefit
> from it.
> 
> In all our past Collada efforts, the developers working on it did
> this out of general interest or as GSoC project, but they were not
> the actual users nor depended on it for productions.
> 
> I really would prefer to not do this via donations or fund raisers,
>  but to locate a couple of companies with development departments
> who can practically help us out here. Would you be able to help
> with that? It can be quite simple even, just companies scratching
> their itches... what would hold them back to help us, or how can we
> get them involved?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -Ton-
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
> Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The
> Netherlands
> 
>