[Bf-committers] Collada importer/exporter kickout

[Campbell Barton]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 9:52 AM, spatial <spatial at huf.org> wrote:
>
> > For the COLLADA community Blender is definitely one of the most
> > important stakeholders to stop supporting COLLADA would make things in
> > DCC exchange even worse.
> I agree. Not to mention all those who co use it alongside LW , all of
> DAZ products....etc.
>
> I actually tried to avoid a discussion here since a long time,
> but topic is too important.
>
> First, kicking out collada from blender doesn't help anyone. None of the
> "common" interexchange formats is that reliable / support all features.
> To have at least a second format as a backup strategy,  if a certain
> features arent't supported / have some unreliable results, is a "must
> have" in every cross application enviroment.

Its frustrating that a lot of this discussion seems to revolve around
possible solutions for _other_ people to work on which blender
_should_ support.
We already tried to support collada and pretty much failed by the looks of it.

Kicking out collada helps because it means we don't give users a
barely working feature they report bugs about that we can't fix. It
helps not to give users crappy software. no?

It also helps to move into a branch that motivated people can work on
- so this feature can reach some level of quality before moving back
into trunk.

> And btw, blenders FBX import is, from my experience, still not as
> reliable as it should be, to actually replace collada. (sorry, this is
> no actual bashing... its already great what has been archived...
> especially if you consider that it is allways pain in the ass, to
> support such a complex exchange format)

again, would be nice to hear some example, even anecdotal as to what
isn't working in FBX (assume you mean exporter since we don't have a
stable importer).

> > We are currently discussing further financing of OpenCOLLADA and will
> > spend more time the next months on bugfixing and conformance tests.
> >
> Sorry to say this, but this is one of the mayor reasons I have to post this:
>
> Conformance tests do only help a little to 0
> The big _advantage_ fbx has, is a working reference application called maya.

FBX was written for Kaydara Motionbuilder, which I used as a
reference, Maya support was added later and it still doesn't support
all Motionbuilder's rigging options last I tested.
There are files written out of blender which work in Motionbuilder and
not correctly in Maya.

> No conformance test can actually be that foolproof to support all
> features and variations. So by this simple unoffical agreement,"if it
> doesn't work in maya - it is broken", users and developers have an ideal
> platform to discuss errors / find workarounds.  This greatly avoids the
> "picking in the dark" situation all developers currently face with
> collada. Even if a dev doesn't have access to it, in a lot of cases, he
> can track down problems reported by users who do provide a simple
> screenshot.
>
> Could this collada reference application be Blender ?
> For me this is a very attractive idea, but also, I'm very aware of the fact,
> that I'm opening a can of worms I'm actually in no way in the right
> position to touch.

its possible, but at some point we need to follow a spec that works
elsewhere for it to be useful.
Otherwise having overly specific blender/collada format runs the risk
of nobody adopting it and looses a lot of blender developer time.

> Anyway just my 2 cents on this.
> chris
>
>
>
>
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--
- Campbell