Open Letter: COLLADA momentum
Blender Foundation chairman Ton Roosendaal voices some concerns about development of the COLLADA specification, and offers some suggestions for solutions.
Ton writes:Open letter to everyone involved with managing/using COLLADA as proposed open 3d exchange format:
This is a follow-up on the discussion I had with Khronos at Siggraph, especially on getting COLLADA supported better. In some ways things – on Blender side – improve steadily. But I also get disappointed reactions of professional users expecting things to work much better than we can provide still.
From the Blender side I think we’re quite well equipped and supported now. There’s a small but active team of 4 people working on it.
In order to keep momentum I have two suggestions for Khronos or the Collada team[…]
Continue reading at code.blender.org: COLLADA momentum.
Heh. Opensource projects that boost each other by motivational letters?
Sounds like a nice idea :)
Let’s hope, the OpenCollada project reacts to that letter soon.
Chances are, it’ll take “>6 months [time ’till response]”
all the more reason that Blender should start supporting Alembic.
Demohero linked to this on his blog http://foreverblender.blogspot.com/2011/10/news-new-alembic-support-branch.html
It’s a modern, fast, and efficient exchange format that will be supported and backwards compatible and it’s already being used at ILM and Sony Imageworks.
Collada is designed for archiving and interchanging realtime assets.
Alembic is designed for assets in a movie production.
Neither is really a replacement for the other at the moment.
@ca2c5f3d9ee2f7f581276a5511cefb52:disqus
Just to make it clear:
Alembic is NOT a scene exchange format in the traditional sense. For example it heavily relies on baking mesh animation data etc.
On a freeware / open source level a more compareable pipeline would be to animate a figure in daz,
but only export to blender via mdd + obj. Alembic makes sense if you do want to work in both programs at the same time.
In general Ton is right, in analysis and proposed actions:
:
And to say it more drastically Collada slowly becomes the dxf of scene files, while fbx slowly becomes the obj.
To push ONE export / import library to become some kind of standard and to keep an eye, that this standard is actually kept uphold, in most applications might be really the only way to prevent this fate.