but in that case is a problem of autodesk and all the software import the model with their SDK. From a user perspective or studio perspective its a important point to share models between diferent teams around the world or in the same office.
It is well known that fbx is kind of messy. But, it would still be easier to use the official SDK directly. And the reason why that is not possible is clearly the GPL.
Seriously? The GPL is a huge reason why Blender is what it is today, and consequently why you are posting on this forum. You don’t have to worship Stallman and believe in the ideology of Free Software, but don’t push a false narrative where you are a victim of this license. Unlike most “industry standard software” you are not handcuffed to using Blender.
To me it is clearly the FBX license that makes it impossible.
The problem is that blender could be bigger with GPL, but in a point like actually, devs cannot do all the necesary things. And GPL don’t allow to make third plugins for blender, because they don’t want liberate the technology. Blender could have other open source licenses without this problem, like apache license, but they cannot move from GPL.
It’s true that some alternatives like max and maya are old softwares really bad to work in modeling. But 3DCoat, Zbrush, Modo, Houdini,… are really good options for each type of work.
Actually other software are good and they think more in the user and have a lot of third parties plugins. If BF don’t find a solution to this block… probably I will need to migrate in some time. for a easy reason, I need to use the best software for my work, pay 500 dollars each year is not a problem.
You need to understand that when you work with a tool… the important thing is work better. Not the tool, I’m not a fan of blender (well, my partners tell that I’m a blender priest). I use it because I think that for modeling it’s the best. But If I will do works with particles… blender will be a very bad solution. The same with big simulations,… Maybe in two-three years all will be substance painter or design, if use substance is the complete standard in movies, archviz, games,… what we do with blender that don’t allow it and the GPL block the implementation?
Also, by the other hand. For my is impressive the work that a little foundation like Blender Foudantion can do each year when autodesk had decades of zero improvements in max…
About FBX, it’s like a social relation. You don’t like how is a guy and you don’t want to talk with it, ok. But if he is the friend of everybody and go to all the parties… you have two options, accept him or be alone. The same happens with FBX, don’t you like it? ok, but it’s a standard and all people preffer it to the Open Source solution.
And of course, be Open Source is not be better.
If you are arguing from an ideological point of view, that is certainly true. I am looking at it from a pragmatic point of view.
Who the hell cares. These companies simply do what they do to increase profits or their cred on Wall Street. Where the so called CEOs have stock in their own company. It’s simply shifting wealth from workers to the upper twenty percent which has played out for over forty years. And, the ballot box is all we have and repeated phone calls to our elected individuals. It is simply what it is and we are charged with changing it.
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So the idea is to have the government pass a law to force the commercial companies to make their formats compatible with the GPL!?
I don’t think the US constitution mentions anything about a right to easily use proprietary software with FOSS solutions like Blender. Besides that, there’s enough game creation solutions out there to make it easy to ‘vote’ by switching software. Don’t like Unity’s direction, look at Godot, Atomic Engine, Unreal 4, or even UPBGE (the latter is mentioned because of the work being done to make it an official part of 2.8).
From where i’m looking at - only fear can be seen.
“GPL is God in the eyes of Lucifer.”
i still prefer other formats, use FBX as a last resort
tried Unity once 
nah… unreal or cry is my game, would love to use BGE - as am only creating a narrative, presentations or informational interactive stuff… IMO, simplicity, eyecandy & lightness (fun, joy, happy) is where it all comes from
I haven’t used B2U but it seems that maybe the community has already addressed this whole Unity integration issue. That’s how it should be handled imo, if the BF and Unity themselves aren’t interested. I know this thread turned to in a GPL discussion and believe me I think Blender should have gone with a more permissive license to begin with. Blender could have been a major platform to build from. Plugin developers would have come in droves, they are always looking to make money and any audience in a niche market like ours is a potential paying customer. However fact is Blender is tied under GPL, nothing is going to change that unless the devs decide to just start from scratch with 3.0 or something. Let’s instead show support to the B2U developers who are doing pretty cool things, and hope they give us one for Unreal as well.
I’m not arguing for making .blend a general exchange format (it’s too Blender-specific for that), but just to give people the possibility to read the data without bringing in the GPL. From there, data can be converted to FBX using the FBX SDK. There is no licensing issue here.
It actually makes a huge difference (in terms of workload) whether you have to reverse-engineer the whole file-format. The point of the SDK is to be able to use the data without dealing with the data format itself, so that if the data format changes, client code doesn’t break. Blender won’t enjoy that luxury.
The differences in interpretation go on top of that, but you’ll have similar problems with open formats like Collada. Different programs do similar things differently.
How is the GPL so relevant to Blender’s success? If you can show me that most of the developers are copyleftists that wouldn’t show up for work otherwise, that would be some evidence.
However, you’re also disregarding all the more business-oriented groups that aren’t touching Blender because it is GPL software. You’ll never know what Blender would’ve been either way.
To me it is clearly the FBX license that makes it impossible.
That’s ass-backwards. There’s many free software licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache, MPL…) that would allow using the FBX SDK. Only the strong copyleft licenses like the GPL are causing issues here.
I don’t see what’s pragmatic about a format that changes as Autodesk sees fit, where even commercial software choose to stick with an older SDK. This story also show the issue with the SDK, since Unity has to enter a “partnership” with Autodesk to gain access to the source code, for “improved import and export capabilities for Autodesk’s FBX filetype that extend to support both the Autodesk interactive physically based shader and custom properties.” Everyone else using the SDK are practically at a disadvantage, unless they “partner up” with Autodesk.
What is more pragmatic is what VFX studios does: relinquish control of their inhouse formats, and become open source maintainers instead.
I won’t answer on the behalf of others, but speaking for myself and the contributions I’ve been able to do, the GPL is a huge factor. If you have followed Blender from its liberation until now, you would know that many core developers and artists feel the same way. On the other hand, if you are right and the GPL is a major hindrance to people, where is the permissively licensed DCC suite with a massive momentum? (Hint: it’s a rhetorical question.)
I know people are sick of license talk, and so am I but in another way. To me, complaining about the GPL, is like complaining over free food because it doesn’t have Michelin stars attached to it.
Whether it is the current or an older SDK does not really matter. Using an SDK versus reverse engineering the format is the thing I am talking about. I am absolutely certain that the developers would have used the SDK if it would have been possible.
The GPL is a very good license in my opinion. In the case of Blender, I am absolutely sure that there would be numerous high quality addons, if it was e.g. licenses under LGPL.
Everybody chooses to stick with older stuff, all the time. Unity was stuck with an ancient version of Mono for years. Most CG software is still stuck on Python 2.
Establishing a new “open source” format would mean several phases of revisions, do you expect all those applications to follow through with all of those immediately?
This story also show the issue with the SDK, since Unity has to enter a “partnership” with Autodesk to gain access to the source code, for “improved import and export capabilities for Autodesk’s FBX filetype that extend to support both the Autodesk interactive physically based shader and custom properties.” Everyone else using the SDK are practically at a disadvantage, unless they “partner up” with Autodesk.
So what? Nobody is supporting FBX because it’s such a great format, but because Autodesk owns all the major DCC applications. You can win from a partnership, you don’t win from not supporting FBX.
What is more pragmatic is what VFX studios does: relinquish control of their inhouse formats, and become open source maintainers instead.
How is that pragmatic? Who is going to support all these crappy in-house formats, just because they’re “open source”? COLLADA was an in-house format as well, then it became a Khronos standard, still it’s not supported. Autodesk has no incentive to support an open format, even the other commercial applications support FBX.
If there was a Blender SDK that is actually usable (and not GPL), maybe game engines would actually support it.
I won’t answer on the behalf of others, but speaking for myself and the contributions I’ve been able to do, the GPL is a huge factor. If you have followed Blender from its liberation until now, you would know that many core developers and artists feel the same way.
You don’t have to speak on behalf, you can just give quotes (if you find them). I have been following development for a long while (much longer than the age of this account) and I couldn’t recall any strong statement of support of copyleft licensing by core developers. I would also surmise that most former core developers are currently employed developing non-free software, but that’s just an aside.
At least Brecht (and the Cycles contributors) didn’t have strong reservations to re-license with the non-copyleft APL, so now Cycles can be integrated even in non-free software.
On the other hand, if you are right and the GPL is a major hindrance to people, where is the permissively licensed DCC suite with a massive momentum? (Hint: it’s a rhetorical question.)
Where is any other DCC suite with “massive” momentum? There’s only so much work going into free software and most of it will gravitate towards the biggest thing. The license is a hindrance, period. I’m not saying it’ll make or break an application.
You were praising the GPL for contributing so much towards Blender’s success. Yet, whenever the topic of integrating with industry tools (most of which are not free software), the GPL shows up as a problem factor. The rest of the industry is not bending over backwards to support our licensing. Blender remains more isolated. If the GPL doesn’t outweight that, it’s a net loss.
Just an update on the status of open formats, there’s currently active feature request threads in both the Unity and Unreal communities on the implementation of a glTF importer (with mostly positive comments among Unreal users and mixed comments among Unity users).
So the word regarding the format is getting out there. Some Unity users take issue to it, but one of them is about the name which is unrelated to its capabilities (for marketing purposes). The other issue is that some veterans aren’t ready to put their trust in anything said by Godot developers (and that may primarily be due to the engine being far newer than Unity and having far less clout at the moment).
To be fair though, the Godot devs. have only gotten onto the glTF train recently with the unveiling of version 2 (version 1 was seen as rather weak in comparison).
It should be pointed out that Microsoft is actually pushing glTF pretty hard right now, too.
It’s the only supported format for the Windows Mixed Reality/Holographic objects, and they even say to use the Blender glTF exporter to create them
As usual, forums are not really representative for the overall user base. One of them also mentioned that Blender was dropping FBX support.
Veterans are certainly not convinces. There is a format that works right now and the way to convince them is to demonstrate that the other one works just as reliable and hopefully with fewer issues. This would be a big plus.
Fire up reverse engineering tools to get current opensource FBX code even better, ignore Autodesk prison licence.
Even if you don’t agree with a software license, you are legally still not allowed to reverse engineer it.
privately & for study purposes you are free to do so, commercially you’re prohibited
only by doing it, the flaws (bugs & f.lies…) get exposed (ie. VW, MS, Watergate, Leaks…)
it’s about what you do with the knowledge gained
Not in europe