[Bf-committers] The future of FBX and/or other formats in Blender

[Fabio Pesari]

On 02/10/2016 01:23 PM, Keith Boshoff wrote:
> I'm speaking from a Unity perspective and the chances of them including
> other mesh formats in the near future are slim to none (Though I'm still
> going to nag them about it). I'm pretty sure the same is true for Unreal,
> Crytek, Lumberyard and definitely Stingray.

A proprietary program decides to arbitrarily not implement some formats,
so Blender should follow suit, is that right?

If Unity wants to play the lock-in game, that's theirs to play. Nothing
prevents them from making deals with AutoDesk to make their formats the
default, for example.

I don't see how that should prevent Blender from making the right
choice, that is, to use formats that are fully documented, unencumbered
from patents and free, and do not require any reverse-engineering.

> The other problem with open standards is that they are usually interpreted
> as a free-for-all as far as features are concerned (see Collada), having
> never looked at either of the proposed formats this may be a moot point,
> but still something to consider moving forward..

This certainly happened in the past, however there is nothing inherent
to free formats that makes this easier, and the Blender team could
simply avoid doing that.

And proprietary formats which break every time a new "version" is
released are even worse, by the way.

> In short having a stable, open standard for interchange would be the ideal,
> but realistically FBX support is sadly still **very** important if any
> interchange with current game engines is required.

The two goals aren't incompatible: the Blender devs could both maintain
FBX support and implement new formats, although I would argue the latter
as higher priority (since it favors all users and not only those who
purposefully choose to rely on proprietary technologies which limit them).