[Bf-committers] Please can we get a decision about future support for Collada ?

[Brecht Van Lommel]

I think the main issue is that every feature in Blender has some
maintenance cost. Refactoring, updating for new features, bug fixing,
building library dependencies, etc, also for people who are not
maintaining the module itself. Especially with big refactoring like
Blender 2.8. Imagine for example big changes to the material system
that would require Collada material I/O to be rewritten.

The question is then if it's worth the cost. A few years ago Collada
seemed like it could become a real 3D interchange standard, but it
seems that hasn't happened. Looking ahead 2 years for the Blender 2.8
release, will it still be relevant then?

Still there are some users, so it would be interesting to understand
what they use it for. I've seen some people use Collada for basic mesh
export from Blender into some smaller or custom game engines, but
other file formats could work for that as well. For materials,
animation, armatures I'm under the impression that I/O was never
working well enough (both on Blender's and other application's sides).

But maybe there will still be important use cases for it in 2 years
and I'm just unaware of them.

On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Gaia Clary
<gaia.clary at machinimatrix.org> wrote:
> Hello;
>
> Recently there was a serious discussion about removing the Collada
> module from Blender. As far as i understand there is no decision
> made yet, but i have the impression that all main developers want
> this module to be removed.
>
> * The main problem with keeping Collada seem to be the size of its
>     libraries (some 40 MBytes) which need to be shipped with Blender
>     releases.
>
> * The main problem with creating a Python based alternative is that
>     Creating a Collada Importer for Blender is a challenge. Collada
>     exporters are not such a big problem.
>
> Can we get a decision on that? Depending on that decision i will
> either continue to maintain the Collada module or let it go.
>
> But Please do not misunderstand me. If the decision is made to keep
> the Collada module, then i will of course continue working on it.
> Otherwise i will step to new challenges :)
>
> thanks
> cheers,
> Gaia
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