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

[Doeke Wartena]

The best way to let FBX die is to support other formats!
I hate autodesk more then Ton hates installers and progress bars.

2016-02-10 16:44 GMT+01:00 Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org>:

> Hi,
>
> Money is very welcome. Industry users can do two things:
>
> 1) Let their company sign up for the development fund:
> https://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/
>
> (We get about 100 grand per year, which is 1% of what C4D users give to
> Maxon annually).
>
> 2) Hire developers yourself! Or assign your own developers part time on IO
> for Blender.
>
> A crowd-funder for 1 feature only is very risky. What precisely do we
> define to fund? Who would crowdfund a developer to just fix bugs and
> maintenance for 2 years? I doubt people would pay for that. I wouldn't even
> know where to find such a coder...
>
> For 2.8 we can do a big fund raiser, and include this on the work
> planning. I think professionals rather see us to keep working on the whole
> pipeline, starting with good PBR shader editing in viewports.
>
> -Ton-
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
> Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
> Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands
>
>
>
> > On 10 Feb, 2016, at 16:13, Fergal Gribben <fgribben at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I agree with Fabio and David - if industry users are so reliant on FBX
> > support within Blender, then crowdfunding/hiring a developer to work
> > specifically on FBX support is probably worth investigating. From what
> > Bastien has said, keeping up with the latest FBX format sounds like a
> major
> > pain, and from what I can tell, focusing efforts on supporting glTF or
> USD
> > would be time better spent.
> >
> > A professional Unity license costs $75 a month, a 3DS Max subscription
> with
> > basic support costs €238 a month, and a Maya LT subscription with basic
> > support costs €35.70 a month
> >
> > If lacking FBX support in Blender would cause people to switch to
> > expensive, proprietary software, is it too much to ask that they instead
> > donate to FBX development within Blender? If industry users were to
> donate
> > a fraction of the aforementioned licensing costs on a monthly basis,
> > perhaps that would be enough support for a dedicated FBX developer?
> >
> > I believe EpicGames donated €10k to the development fund for better FBX
> > support in the past (
> > https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/485431565447868416) - is that
> too
> > ambitious a goal for crowdfunding?
> >
> > And just to weigh in with my own personal experiences as a hobbyist game
> > dev: the FBX format terrifies me! :) Personally, I couldn't make sense of
> > the file format, especially when it came to animations, so I instead
> > decided to create my own file format for my game engine. At least that
> way
> > I know exactly what information is available to me, and I know that any
> > bugs I encounter are related to my game engine's implementation, and not
> > due to how Blender has exported the scene. The same applies to a lot of
> > other hobbyist/home users I know, either they get by with the .obj
> format,
> > or they roll their own. Furthermore, any inconsistencies with my own file
> > format are easily identified and fixed, whereas FBX to me was a bit of a
> > black box.
> >
> > I guess what I'm trying to say is, the FBX format seems much more
> important
> > to users who work in the industry, rather than home/hobbyist users, and I
> > think if the demand was there as much as industry users have conveyed, a
> > push for donations/crowdfunding would be enough to achieve better FBX
> > support.
> >
> > On 10 February 2016 at 14:57, Vicente Carro <vicentecarro at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Well, instead of crowdfunding, that I think it's not going to work, I
> would
> >> suggest to officially (Ton) talk with Unreal, Unity, Valve and maybe
> some
> >> of the blender partners and expose the problem to them. If possible make
> >> them talk all together. Since all of them have some interest in FBX
> working
> >> in Blender probably they can agree to have a guy maintaining FBX for
> >> Blender or to give us other solution.
> >>
> >> Vicente
> >>
> >> On 10 February 2016 at 14:48, David Fenner <d4vidfenner at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>> 2016-02-10 11:28 GMT-03:00 Fabio Pesari <fabio at pesari.eu>:
> >>>
> >>>> , but if it "dies" in
> >>>> terms of fewer contributions due to poor funding, it will be exactly
> >>>> because of people who would rather buy* expensive proprietary programs
> >>>> than donate at least 1/3 of that money to Blender. Why the double
> >>> standard?
> >>>> * = in some cases, rent, because many of those other programs use DRM
> >>>>    and are subscription-based.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Talking about double standard here is waaay too idealistic. Users buy
> >>> software when they need to, and when open source software meets all
> their
> >>> needs, they donate when they can or want. Still, having thousands of
> >> users
> >>> using blender is still better for the software, since studios do
> develop
> >>> for blender for time to time, they also contribute bug reports, ideas,
> >>> sometimes money, and they spread the use of the software, which makes
> big
> >>> studios start to develop also for blender. Is an ecosystem based on
> >> users.
> >>> Sadly, people don't appreciate what they have until they can lose it,
> and
> >>> that's what I'm saying that maybe fbx export should be crowdfunded.
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