We have had some interest in support for FARO’s formats from few users and I would like to get a bit of feedback on what 3rd party formats we should look at supporting. Unfortunately, supporting 3rd party formats can be challenging as they are often proprietary and the owner may not have a suitable developer partner network that we can join. Sometimes, the owner wants to maintain the format as proprietary which makes it even harder to accomplish. We have opened discussions with most scanner manufacturers, and several software vendors, but progress has been slow to date. In some cases, there is an added cost to supporting a proprietary format so we would like to have your input on where we should focus our efforts.
If you have a few moments, please answer the questions below:
How many of you would like direct support for FARO?
What other formats would like us to support?
Would you be willing to purchase an extra plugin for Sequoia to provide the 3rd Party support? What would you see as a reasonable price for this?
I think the existing selection of point cloud formats is good and would rather see effort go towards furthering Sequoia’s other features rather than chasing after other vendor’s formats, especially if they aren’t going to make it easy for you. As an industry I think we have been accustomed to pushing around big dumb text files for so long that even if that was the only option for the 1.0 release I don’t think it would hurt you to badly if your other features are compelling.
We mostly use Faro scanners, but don’t have much interest in direct support. We’re spending a fair amount of effort right now trying to standardize our pipeline on e57, at least in part, because of the pain caused by dealing with Faro’s SDK.
If I could request one format it wouldn’t be for point clouds, it would be Alembic for use where Xmesh isn’t available.
A related question: I know there is documentation for the PRT format, are there plans to document SPRT too once it stabilizes?
Actually, SPRT is an extension on top of our newly redesigned PRT v2.0 file format. We have every intention to document both PRT 2.0 as the successor to the current PRT v1.1 used in Krakatoa, Frost and Stoke, and of course document the additional information stored in the PRT 2.0 file to produce a spatially organized file.
At a later point, we would like to move all our VFX products to PRT 2.0, and encourage third parties to switch to the new format too.
In fact, Krakatoa MX 2.4.x already reads PRT 2.0 and SPRT files, just does not save them yet.
I am one of those have requested of a Faro support, but i agree with Jed, also e57 format is good enough and supported on a large number of softwares.
I also think that the development of Sequoia is more important for all of us.
In my opinion compare to this, the Faro support or other plugins for third party support, take an irrelevant place.
For those of you interested in Faro support, do you want to load individual .fls files or do you want to be able to actually load Faro’s .lsproj and .fws project files?