The remaining two unported official add-ons: X3D and 3DS #62576

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Bastien Montagne · 2019-03-14T15:46:55+01:00

Bastien Montagne commented

2019-03-14 15:46:55 +01:00

This task is mainly to decide whether we want to keep those two formats in our 'IO' pool. I thought I’d ask because am not sure how useful/popular they are nowadays, and because port will not be a small and easy task (at least for X3D, I started working on it today, but we have to at least switch from tessface to full poly and/or looptris, and rewrite the whole material/shader code…).

We also have some new, fairly popular formats (like gltf), so maybe it is time to prune a bit older formats support? Maintaining even one or two formats is a heavy task in itself (you know about which one I am thinking about ;) ).

I don’t have any particular feelings about those two formats, so if they are seen as still valuable, I can keep working on the x3d one, just thought we should talk about it before spending days on it.

This task is mainly to decide whether we want to keep those two formats in our 'IO' pool. I thought I’d ask because am not sure how useful/popular they are nowadays, and because port will not be a small and easy task (at least for X3D, I started working on it today, but we have to at least switch from tessface to full poly and/or looptris, and rewrite the whole material/shader code…). We also have some new, fairly popular formats (like gltf), so maybe it is time to prune a bit older formats support? Maintaining even one or two formats is a heavy task in itself (you know about which one I am thinking about ;) ). I don’t have any particular feelings about those two formats, so if they are seen as still valuable, I can keep working on the x3d one, just thought we should talk about it before spending days on it.

Bastien Montagne commented

2019-03-14 15:46:55 +01:00

Added subscribers: @mont29, @brecht, @ideasman42, @JacquesLucke, @Sergey

Sergey Sharybin commented

2019-03-14 16:06:45 +01:00

Some EDA and CAD are using X3D as an interchange format. For example, that's how i did some 3D models created in Blender and then ported to KiCAD. Quite sure there are more usecases like that.
There is, of course, route Blender -> OBJ/PLY -> FreeCAD -> STEP -> EDA/CAD, but that is more cumbersome.

3DS i am not aware of any real world recent usecase. And there is always a route 3DS -> Blender 2.7x -> BLEND -> Blender 2.8x.

Some EDA and CAD are using X3D as an interchange format. For example, that's how i did some 3D models created in Blender and then ported to KiCAD. Quite sure there are more usecases like that. There is, of course, route Blender -> OBJ/PLY -> FreeCAD -> STEP -> EDA/CAD, but that is more cumbersome. 3DS i am not aware of any real world recent usecase. And there is always a route 3DS -> Blender 2.7x -> BLEND -> Blender 2.8x.

Brecht Van Lommel commented

2019-03-14 16:20:15 +01:00

I think we can drop 3ds from officially supported add-ons and leave porting that to the community.

For X3D I guess the main thing is geometry support. If material support takes a long time I would consider leaving that to the community too.

I think we can drop 3ds from officially supported add-ons and leave porting that to the community. For X3D I guess the main thing is geometry support. If material support takes a long time I would consider leaving that to the community too.

Sergey Sharybin commented

2019-03-14 16:32:25 +01:00

Out of curiosity. What is the difference in material handling between X3D and other formats? Or those others also don't support materials in 2.8?

Bastien Montagne commented

2019-03-14 16:40:06 +01:00

OK, will keep working on X3D then, at least for the geometry part.

@Sergey I added a wrapper around shader nodes (mainly bsdf one), that exposes a material in a similar, easy-to-handle way as our old 'fixed pipeline' model. That change alone requires some work, but is certainly manageable. Issue with X3D is (although I did not check in details yet), that X3D exporter seems to generate glsl shader chunks… I will check that after geometry is done, and if too complicated to port over, just 'disable' it for now.

OK, will keep working on X3D then, at least for the geometry part. @Sergey I added a wrapper around shader nodes (mainly bsdf one), that exposes a material in a similar, easy-to-handle way as our old 'fixed pipeline' model. That change alone requires some work, but is certainly manageable. Issue with X3D is (although I did not check in details yet), that X3D exporter seems to generate glsl shader chunks… I will check that after geometry is done, and if too complicated to port over, just 'disable' it for now.

blender-admin commented

2019-03-16 13:00:17 +01:00

This issue was referenced by blender/blender@e5e6c3b52c

This issue was referenced by blender/blender@e5e6c3b52c0b651e1f301736e47a0c4379c616fa

Bastien Montagne commented

2019-03-16 13:04:28 +01:00

Changed status from 'Open' to: 'Resolved'

Bastien Montagne closed this issue

2019-03-16 13:04:28 +01:00

Martynas Žiemys commented

2019-11-09 11:29:17 +01:00

Added subscriber: @MartinZ

Martynas Žiemys commented

2019-11-09 11:29:17 +01:00

3ds format is still widely used for sharing models online. Many furniture manufacturers use it for example and it may be very helpful and convenient to have native support for it for those of us doing arch viz. It is very sad to see it dismissed with such a short discussion.

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The remaining two unported official add-ons: X3D and 3DS #62576