[Bf-committers] Importing Assets: FBX VS Collada

[Campbell Barton]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 6:48 PM, Chad Fraleigh <chadf at triularity.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 11:29 PM, Toni Alatalo <toni at playsign.net> wrote:
>
>> @Chad yes that is possible, it was discussed on IRC the other day and
>> Ton dismissed (I think sanely) due to it being too difficult for
>> people to install the separate converter (for FBX for example) due to
>> the licenses preventing the distribution of the FBX SDK together with
>> Blender.
>>
>
> So it isn't possible/not trivial to have an automatic installer that (upon
> initiation by the user) downloads and installs the convertor and does the
> SDK license acceptance and downloads and installs that also? And would
> there be any GPL conflicts with having that bootstrap download/installer
> script bundled with blender that does it on request (maybe just a pseudo
> add-on that does when "enabled").

Yep, we can do tricks with linking/pipes/IPC, downloading external
plugins at runtime... we are well aware there are many possible ways
to bypass FBX SDK license problems.

However so far, (AFAICS) nobody has really been motivated to work on
such a system. Especially when we have an FBX exporter distributed
with Blender which works 'good-enough' in many cases.

The FBX importer would be more useful to use the SDK since then we
could load multiple versions of FBX more easily, but still, we have an
importer working without this.
And how much trouble supporting rigging & animation is, we don't fully know yet.