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

Tue Feb 9 20:33:14 CET 2016

Standards can change, and the sooner, the better. World should be open and
friendly, not closed and cluttered with crap from huge companies. As I
don't have to use FBX, I vote against it every possible time. Let's make
something valuable instead of supporting those bastards. They are famous
but their so called standards are nothing more than bad habits. Yes, I
blame autodesk and the others for being closed, money greedy and unfriendly
to the community. That's mine five cents.

pio

Piotr
 Arlukowicz, BFCT

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2016-02-09 13:16 GMT-05:00 Bastien Montagne <montagne29 at wanadoo.fr>:

> Well, once more time: I do not ask to drop FBX, I ask to stop investing
> time in it. Means we would keep it working in current state, but not try to
> add/support/fix new things.
>
> Le 09/02/2016 18:18, Cremuss a écrit :
>
> 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> 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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