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

[Owen Hogarth II]

This +1

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 20:47 Fabio Pesari <fabio at pesari.eu> wrote:

> 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).
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