Re:Pixar's Universal Scene Description
by angersock on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @12:00PM
(#6554064)
COLLADA is a terrible format. It's designed by committee (thanks again, Khronos!).
It's XML, it's overly verbose, the spec is incomplete and has errors in it (at least in 1.4), there are too many moving parts to be useful.
Any format that combines both static mesh definitions, animation weighting and keyframe data, shader programs, material definitions, and scene data, and also has ways of smuggling in additional stuff, is doomed to fail.
.OBJ still wins out for simple static meshes, dumb as it is. Other formats win out for animation.
What we ended up doing was defining some simple binary formats and shoving the metadata and the rest into .json, and zipping the things together. Boom. Done.
EDIT: I don't come from a cinematic CG background, so my sensibilities are weighted more towards realtime and gamedev.
It's XML, it's overly verbose, the spec is incomplete and has errors in it (at least in 1.4), there are too many moving parts to be useful.
Any format that combines both static mesh definitions, animation weighting and keyframe data, shader programs, material definitions, and scene data, and also has ways of smuggling in additional stuff, is doomed to fail.
.OBJ still wins out for simple static meshes, dumb as it is. Other formats win out for animation.
What we ended up doing was defining some simple binary formats and shoving the metadata and the rest into .json, and zipping the things together. Boom. Done.
EDIT: I don't come from a cinematic CG background, so my sensibilities are weighted more towards realtime and gamedev.