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

[Fillippe Chiniara]

I think its a bad move for the game developers that use blender, you would
abandon all of us because fbx is THE standard for game dev , we cant use
anything else with the modern engines, at least nothing with the same level
of support.
On Feb 9, 2016 14:42, "Bastien Montagne" <montagne29 at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> So, lately there's been a lot of FBX-related issues reported to our
> tracker. Most of those are either:
> - Known (half-)broken things (like cameras/lights orientation issues),
> over which I do not intend to spend more time, since those are not
> critical features to support imho.
> - Broken corner-cases in an area that globally works rather well
> (thinking about skeletons here).
> - Mysterious third-party applications-related issues (scaling, skeletons
> again, etc.), that is, bugs that show with one app but not another.
>
> I think later point is a good demonstration that FBX itself is a failure
> and a dead horse - if even rather big and serious companies like Unreal
> or Unity cannot get a reliable FBX importer working using official FBX
> SDK, then how are we supposed to do it without even that SDK?
>
> Further more:
> - In past two years a lot of time and energy was invested (lost) in FBX.
> - </rant> I’m just dead sick of that format, of hitting any possible
> table corner when trying to walk my way in that non-sensible pitch black
> box, etc. </rant>
> - Knowledge I gained of this format and its evolution is **not**
> encouraging at all (stupid things like supporting two different and
> complex transform systems [3DS max and Maya ones, btw ;) ], a very weird
> inconsistency at binary level, etc.). I do not have any feeling this is
> a sane format, nor that it is evolving in a sane direction. It seems to
> be defined a bit as needs arise, piling up new stuff over old ones, etc.
> To summarize: no clear design behind it, and a very dirty way of
> handling new versions of it.
>
> So I would claim to stop relying on and developing it. It would not mean
> we just remove it from Blender, but think it’s time to switch to
> something more modern and open - am aware of at least to possible
> alternatives, which could even be quite complementary.
>
> I) glTF
> Promoted by Khronos group (https://www.khronos.org/gltf), it aims at
> being the open exchange format for games (from simple asset to complete
> scene description).
> Think it’s still very new stuff, not much widely used yet, but it seems
> to have some support from several major companies (including Microsoft
> and even - rofl - Autodesk, see http://gltf.autodesk.io/).
>
> II) USD
> Promoted by Pixar (http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/), it aims at being
> some kind of generic pipeline format for CG studios (it also has
> integration of Alembic e.g.).
> I have no idea of its acceptance currently, but sounds like it could be
> a valuable option for our 2.8 'pipeline/inter-application exchange' goal?
>
> (as a side note, interesting to see that those two have a similar
> approach, they are not monolithic files but rather a combination of
> binary data and textual descriptions…)
>
> Anyway, those are very early reflections, would like to get your
> feelings about those two formats/projects (or others you may have in
> mind! ;) ), but I’m feeling much more enthusiast at the idea of spending
> time on modern, open-designed (or at least, open-specified) formats,
> than on piece of proprietary crap!
>
> Again, even if we end up deciding we stop trying to fully support FBX as
> our main exchange format, it would keep being supported in its current
> status at least for one or two years - just I would not try to add
> support for new versions (2016 one seems to have some incompatibilities
> with our code already), nor would try to understand and fix more stuff
> in that format.
>
> And that’s a long enough mail, thanks for reading it!
> Bastien
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