[Bf-committers] GSOC 2015 Project Idea - OpenGEX Importer

[Josh Stratton]

I'm curious how many people are using this OpenGEX standard.  I see a
website and a wikipedia page, but don't see who's using it.  I don't agree
that including every standard is going to solve the problem.  Wouldn't a
student's time be better served fixing the errors in the collada importer
since it's an already established albeit complicated standard?

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Jonathan Railsback <jonbitzen at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Everyone -
>
> How about an OpenGEX Python Importer Plugin for Blender?
>
> I've been doing some work with the Blender COLLADA importer, and something
> with a simpler, more coherent spec (such as OpenGEX)
> could help Blender attract more users in game development area.
>
> I was trying to use Blender to customize models from popular asset stores
> (Unity, Turbosquid) but was always hampered by the fact
> that nothing ever worked quite well.  The Autodesk FBX->COLLADA converter
> has issues, and other tools I found exported
> animation using a non-matrix format (rot-X,rot-Y,rot-Z,scale, and
> translation) that didn't work well with Blender unless you implemented
> annoying work-arounds (which I'll be glad to share if anyone cares!).
>
> For whatever its worth, I've read the COLLADA spec and the OpenGEX spec as
> well, and OpenGEX is at least a lot more compact
> so it must be easier to understand :)
>
> I've been pondering working on such a thing myself, but I suspect a
> student working on it full-time over
> the summer will make more progress than I can in a few evenings here and
> there.
>
> Eric Lengyel, author of the OpenGEX spec, created it to support his game
> engine, and has written exporters for Maya, Max, and Blender to allow
> models to
> be imported into his engine.  I guess the idea here is that an importer
> would help support cross-tool content pipelines in the game development
> area, since the export plugins for Autodesk tools already exist.
>
> I suspect I wasn't the only one on Earth that has tried to edit models but
> got stuck by the mess that is COLLADA and the non-GPL-friendly blackbox
> which is FBX.
>
> I did some Googling, and I think someone has already written a python
> library to parse OpenDDL (the text-based language used by OpenGEX) so I
> dont think it would be a totally ground-up effort.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jon
>
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