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

[Cremuss]

Hi,

As evil as FBX is, and I totally understand why you think it's a
dead-end (and it is, truly), I feel it is a necessary evil for now.

Many of us pro Game Artists rely on FBX file format because there's
simply no other choice yet. I export a lot of animated stuff to UE4 and
Unity, and dropping FBX support in Blender would mean I'd most certainly
have to buy and use a proprietary 3D software to work, which is a shame.

A minimal FBX support would still work for me though, because,
/personally/, I just need to be able to /export/ animated meshes and
armatures, mostly to Unity and UDK/UE4. So dropping support of the FBX
importer, as well as the support of lights, cameras and any other fancy
stuff wouldn't affect me or my work at all. But that's just me.

However, I'm all for supporting an open format if it will allow me to
export animated data to Unity/UDK/UE4 by the time we fully drop FBX
support. But as far as I know, there's no open FBX yet :/

I know Unreal has donated to the Blender Foundation to work on the FBX
exporter so they seems open and friendly to me. Maybe there's a way to
talk to them and see what kind of options we have.

Anyway, that's just my honest opinion!:)

Le 09/02/2016 17:49, Fillippe Chiniara a écrit :
>
> 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
> <mailto: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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>
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