FBX format
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/FBX format
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| Someone was talking about the FBX format a while ago. Who was it, and can you please contact me? Thanks. |
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| a Search of the forums for FBX returns a number of threads. |
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| None of which answer my question. |
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| Why exactly FBX instead of Collada? And without asking your question, the person can not answer or contact you, don't you think? :) |
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| Why collada and not fbx? |
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| Open Format, not another autodesk format like ASE and the like. |
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| I think Collada is more common...maybe? I don't really understand it, I have been told that FBX supports or extends Collada, or something like that. |
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| Don't know. But out of my experience, at some point any Autodesk format was a problem with any app I used. Simplest one is 3DS and how the app implement it but it continued with ASE and I don't believe in the wonder that FBX will end any better. And for collada there is especially a open source loader / saver straight available. So either all export it correctly or all wrong :) |
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| Collada is very uncommon, especially in the game industry. It's more or less a bloated XML-based format that tries to appeal to everyone and ends up tripping over itself, thus appealing to nobody. FBX is handy as a format for going between two applications, but ultimately isn't terribly useful either. |
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| You are right that it is an "XML" format and the creators themself mention that it is not meant to be used as a game format. But it is a great format to transfer between apps as it does not mind how large they are during the creation and transfer process, right? The loading is not performance critical unlike it is in the game run. More and more apps are able to load the collada files and convert them into different formats. Something that I would like to see on real OBJ for example but that most likely never will happen due to the different OBJ versions. Collada at least only has a single, fullfeatured standard. The only real common standard for game models is X, if you want to get to that point. |
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| The only real common standard for game models is X, if you want to get to that point. Surely you jest? The X format is about as non-standard as it's possible to get. For starters, it has three types: text, binary and compiled binary. Then it has a version for each DirectX release. Then it has all the variations between different applications in the way they scale animation, etc. I literally cannot think of a more non-standard format. For transferring data between two modellers, FBX is excellent. ( It's not an AutoDesk format btw, it was created by Kaydara who were later bought out by Alias, who themselves were subsequently bought out by AutoDesk. The key words here being later and subsequently. ) Collada is yesterday's news. A year ago, it was the hot new thing and everything was going to support it. Then it all sort of fizzled out and everyone lost interest. I suppose it's a poor man's FBX at best, but as Noel already said, it doesn't really serve it's purpose any more. I'm not sure if it was always this bloaty and buggy or if that's just what's happened to it along the way. |
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| Collada is very uncommon, especially in the game industry. Everything uses Collada. However, you do not use it as your final game format to load from, because it is bloated and slow. I think the common practice is to write a converter to go from Collada to your own binary file format. |
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| The Collada format is indeed no direct game format but it could be used to store the data for your games, in your engine you will have some kind of converter to a maybe binary cache system and after the first start of your game this cache file is created. Then on later starts only the cache file is loaded. I'm currently working on a generic Collada Loader which already loads the meshdata etc. Not a fancy example but the collada sample duck in miniB3D:  |
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| I was offline for a couple weeks. Last time we spoke you said I could take a look at your Collada source and try to make some additions to it. Could you please send that to me? Thank you. |
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| Sorry, I sometimes have trouble with my email account when sending attachments. I will resend it. Same email? |
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| support at leadwerks dot com is fine, please. I am also online on MSN. |
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| Since I have heard nothing from you, I am going to proceed with this on my own, soon. I hope to receive a response from you soon, if possible. |
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| Thank you! |
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