I could disagree more!
Here is my opinion in this topic
Why not loading .blend files??? If blender can’t implement full FBX support why don’t Blender Foundation hire some developers to write full Collada or even native .blend support for:
3ds max, Maya, Unreal Engine and few other apps that’s matter.
This strategy is old as the Troy Horse, if you can’t win in fair fight than you have to have someone/something behind enemy line
Hope someone will start raising funds someday, for this kind of diversion
Regards.
If you want to write a blend loader thats useful for anything other then basic meshes, you end up needing to re-implement parts of blender (Think animations, drivers, IK, NLA, modifiers, constraints).
This is why writing out a file from Blender has a fairly large advantage over someone attempting to write a loader for Blend files directly.
(yes, blenders code is open-source, someone might be able to use it to write an importer in theory… but this is very impractical).
What am I missing exactly? What is Blender missing that’s a ‘must have’ for Unreal 4? Everything seems to work. I know Unity auto-exports for you which makes iteration convenient but what does that truly save you. 2 minutes per iteration?
I think the fact that Epic is looking out for the Blender community is all we can ask. They seem to want to make sure everything works and as far as I can tell, we’re in pretty good shape.
The Maya rig thingy is kinda cool but honestly, it’s no big deal. We already have some pretty nice auto-rigging tools that should export just fine. Anything Epic makes for us will be very well received but I feel fortunate that we have what we got.
100% working FBX importer and exporter. You can export FBX, but importing is problematic, and also the FBX exporter is absolutely terrible and a outdated version.
@vblanco, Blender 2.71 has an updated FBX Export which writes version 7.4x of the spec (test it in a nightly build).
@Sinan, as for weather .blend can work or not, YMMV, of course in some cases its workable, but you really loose a lot of abilities, and any support is limited and needs updating, for instance if we add a new modifier, it wont automatically be supported (same goes for many other features).
Why this is impractical? Why to maintain third party standards like FBX. In my opinion it is almost insane. What we need is some kind of simple file based on .blend, that will contain modules like mash, keys and textures in v.1.0, maybe IK in v2.0… in v5.0 all .blend file info. And most important, this file format should be fully documented with code and implementation samples. Full backward compatibility, full open source. Then we need to write few importers to most important apps like:
-first of all: game engines (which support in development and cooperation from blender site in last time is almost none)
engines - Unity, UD4, Cry Engine?
than 3d package
max, maya, modo - to give autodesk and foundry users freedom to implement blender to their pipeline, first for testing, experiments and hopefully in feature for migration.
and of course some compositing software
If BF won’t take this kind of task in own hands, than nobody in whole world will done this kind of work pro bono instead of BF.
If you want to promote blender, than you need to promote its standards not autodesk!!!
No, if you want to promote Blender, you absolutely want to support Autodesk’s standards for the simple reason they can’t very well abandon them with all their customers relying on them. We need interoperability, not world conquest.
And how it is going so far. Every major autodesk competitor has overwhelmed troubles to implement full FBX. Just google it, modo’s, lw’s and others, users complaining about not fully compatible and complete with autodesk fbx importers/exporters. So in my opinion it’s not good direction at all. Years ago I was hoping that collada will resolve all of this nightmare, but major gamers did not welcome collada with open arms. So in my opinion there is no other way, than design, maintain and even implement (by writing own importers/exporters to UE4, max, etc…) solutions.
And of course diversity is good so, now, we need as good as is possible import/export FBX too… but tomorrow BF should concentrate to design and promote own standards.
@wyslij - If BF promotes blend file as a standard, chances are it will be really well supported by Blender only,
Even if BF invested in writing in support for other applications, that isn’t a once-off task.
Someone needs all those other applications installed, pay money for the apps (and maybe more for the SDK?). not sure how that works in every case…
Then each release we would need to update it, sometimes only minor changes… but not always.
Then we also need to make the importer on 3rd party apps load different versions of Blend files, this gets quite complicated.
I wouldn’t complain if someone wanted to do this, but I also dont see it as a very good use of time, and very much doubt it would be any more successful then collada has been.
Blend file is basically a memory dump of Blender’s data structures, it was never intended as an exchange format.
Maybe this project will get off the ground and become successful:
Thats why I wrote that this kind of blender file format should be backward compatible and full documented.
Doom and UE4 can import maya files directly, so I think this is direction for blender too. Even if some cost/work need to be done and some redesign the bland file to be backward compatible. But This is my suggestion and I am just an observer…
Anyway It seams that UE tech guys are working on some improvements
Does anyone know what the comment about ‘Unreal IO’ means? Does it mean UDK or UE3 or UE2? I get the feeling that GSoC/Dev Fund or whatever isn’t targetting UE4, which is a shame, because I’d like for Blender to be ahead of the curve on import/export for once. Right now I go from Blender into Maya LT to export FBX because the Blender FBX exporter doesn’t write files that UE4 can read without a lot of tweaking.
Also, Blender is still missing some tools for game artists. The biggest one for my workflow is vertex normal editing (for foliage). I just get frustrated when resources are dedicated to old technology or BGE (which doesn’t have any commercial games made on it that I know of) when we are so close to having a tool that truly competes with Maya or Max for games.
Yep I know it just exports fbx from its built in operation.
It was like this on a fbx file exported from 2.69a. On Unity 4.3.3f1.
I’m sorry I havent checked it on 2.70a+
I think it is something on the Unity side. I m not sure its because of the fbx exporter on blender.
I do not know if exported FBX writes the morph targets (shapekeys) correctly. However last time I checked Unity allowed shapekeys from blend files but not from direct exports from blender.
