Blender To Drop Support For COLLADA? No Need To Panic

The Mesh Forum has a post from Masami Kuramoto pointing to a mailing list discussion, which suggests that Blender, the hugely popular open source 3D creation tool, may soon drop support for COLLADA in release builds, if you’re unsure what any of this means, COLLADA is the format that users export their creations to from within Blender to make it Second Life compatible in terms of Mesh. The opening to the discussion reads:

“Hi,

As everybody noticed current collada importer/exporter is very buggy which seems to make this format almost useless in Blender. And what’s much worse — we don’t actually have developer who maintains this area.

We discussed this already with Campbell and found that OpenCollada itself isn’t actually maintaning — there are only few commits in several months. Ofcourse it doesn’t mean this library is useless and all bug from our tracker is related on that issues, but still.. Maybe the time have come to re-think this importer/exporter (investigate if it’s possible to fix issues in clear way, check if design is good enough — not sure, haven’t touched this code deep myself)?

Here’s our proposal: – Move all collada-related issues into it’s own tracker. Like it was done with BGE, it might help finding volunteer to fix them. Also, people will see that it’s not actually core stuff and that it’s community-supported. – Disable collada in release builds. It’s not useable and only seems to be making artists disappointed.

More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..)

— With best regards, Sergey Sharybin”

This initially looks like a massive blow to Second Life’s Mesh implementation, but in reality it isn’t.

I’m currently using Blender 2.61 and that still happily imports and exports COLLADA and there is no reason why I won’t be able to carry on using version 2.61 in the future. However even if Blender does drop support, there’s nothing to stop people supporting COLLADA in Blender, indeed resourceful Second Life user Gaia Clary is already on the case and has posted a SL COLLADA 1.8 update, designed to work with the Avastar system.

COLLADA isn’t going away, but it seems the Blender team are concerned at the slow progress of COLLADA development and reports of a number of bugs with the format. There is something a bit odd regarding this whole discussion, this format is being criticised for not developing quickly enough in some quarters, whereas Mesh in Second Life has raised a similar argument about people using non Mesh compatible viewers, swings and roundabouts hey. Linden Lab have removed links to older viewers that are non Mesh compatible, however older viewers can still login and TPV’s still make them available, so hopefully the worst case scenario will be that Blender doesn’t have COLLADA support in the release build, but you’ll still be able to find ways to use COLLADA.

The opening discussion message also leaves the door open for people who have the technical ability and the time, to step in and help. Long term, yes this is something to consider as a blow, Blender moving on without COLLADA import/export support will be a blow for Mesh in Second Life, but Mesh in Second Life, like all of Second Life, has to keep moving forward as technology changes and advances are made.

In the short term, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about here, carry on creating your Mesh in Blender and bring it to Second Life, it will work just fine.