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

[metalliandy]

It would be a great start for sure, but other engines and clients/studios would have to follow suit too for the move to be successful.

The problem is that the entire games industry is using FBX as the de facto interchange format, so even if we do get flawless Collada support for all 3 major engines (UE4, Unity and CE3) it doesn't mean that studios are going to move over to it any time soon.

They all have their own internal pipelines that are unfortunately based on Max/Maya, which means that FBX is the perfect solution. Unless a new format comes along that is miles ahead of FBX or Autodesk really screw it up in some amazing way, there simply isn't a reason for them to move to anything else right now. What would be their motivation for doing so? It costs time and money to change a pipeline and they just don't have a good reason for doing so as FBX works perfectly for them.

I will always support new formats in Blender as it makes the software more versatile, but in the 10+ years that I have been working in games I have only ever used Collada files from clients maybe 5 or 6 times, having always received/sent OBJ and over the past few years a mixture of FBX/OBJ.

However much it sucks that we are forced to use a proprietary format, we need to understand that it seems we are the only people who are concerned about FBX being the standard at the moment, at least in games that is. No one is going to change their file format of choice or pipeline based on the misgivings of a community that advocates a program that 98% of studios don't use and currently the games industry as a whole is far more concerned with the move over to PBR, improving visual fidelity (and the retraining/workflow changes that entails) and making sure they can ship their game on time or meet a publishers deadline than replacing a file format that is working just fine at the present time. 

I really do hope we can move over to something more open in the long term, and Collada working well would be a massive step toward that, I'm just not sure that it's a realistic goal for us to expect a whole industry to change because we are having issues reversing a file format. :(

Cheers,

-Andy

> On 12 Feb 2016, at 11:55, Juan Linietsky <reduzio at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 11:29 AM, William Culver <wculver at cedeon.co.uk>
> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> I know the format sucks and we have to reverse it to the point it could
>> break tomorrow anyway.  I think you greatly underestimate its necessity.. I
>> can point straight to more than 5 teenagers I know that downloaded blender
>> to make a game asset for UE4 and that's just my first hand knowledge.   I
>> think FBX export is one of the earliest things one does when dabbling in
>> blender and first impressions count.
>> assets for game engines. As an exchange format between 3D
> 
> If Blender could export Collada properly for game engines, and Unreal 4
> supproted Collada, would it be enough reason for you to drop FBX?
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