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.
Continue reading “Blender To Drop Support For COLLADA? No Need To Panic”