[Bf-gamedev] Proposal to (try to) get better FBX support

[Toni Alatalo]

could Assimp help here? it has an internal format, and can read &
write many formats to / from it. i don't know the format / internal
structure but have understood that it's simple and straightforward and
suitable for games.

afaik they have a json format now but are interested in a binary
format as well. i've used the json format succesfully with three.js in
a test (converted from fbx to assimp2json)

regarding Collada, glTF may address some of the problems by being a
more restricted spec and by having an efficient binary format for the
geom arrays (and json for other stuff, no xml). it might be even nice
to just write glTF directly from Blender if the current solution of
going via collada2gltf is problematic. at least those Khronos
standards have open specs..

2cently yours,
~Toni

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:53 PM, Sam Brubaker <sam at worldsday.org> wrote:
> @JCS, I really like your ideas here, but I still wonder if a "15th Standard"
> might be more strategically sound, even if it's totally insane.
>
> My biggest concern about spending so many resources on FBX is that B-devs
> would be working on something that does not belong to Blender or any
> equivalent NFP organization. It belongs to Autodesk. Autodesk is free to
> break its own format however it likes and nullify all the work we do
> catching up, which is kind of scary. All FBX development on our end
> indirectly helps a company that is not helping us at all.
>
> Of course, our goal should be utility for users, not vindictiveness;
> improving FBX support may be our best move in the short term. But what about
> the long term?
>
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 7:38 AM, Jens Christian Restemeier
> <jens.restemeier at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Another thought:
>> What about porting Blender's FBX code into a clean C++ library, without
>> dependencies on Blender or the official SDK? Blender could then use it
>> through some Python bindings.
>> Basically just a loader/writer, and a high level interface to go through
>> the scenegraph or to build a scene graph. With an MIT or BSD style license
>> to encourage people to use it over the official SDK.
>>
>> That we we have guaranteed interoperability with anyone using the library,
>> and improvements benefit both Blender and applications using it.
>> And it would open a way to sneak in a better format at a later point. You
>> could define a clean legacy-free format, and any application that uses the
>> API just needs a recompile to use it.
>>
>>
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>
>
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