Will there be a published format spec for customers looking to implement importers for inhouse or unsupported 3rd party applications?
- Chad
This is being discussed internally. I’ll let you know when I find out.
Yeah, it’s a bit like redhat and fedora. Or undercutters pizza. Someone could just use the spec to make their own I/O, but most don’t have the skill and patience to do it. Our issue is that we need support for packages you won’t support any time soon in order to replace PC2, BIN, or whatever. Studios that have inhouse applications will be more likely to use Alembic or roll their own format unless they know they’ll be able to integrate the format fully.
chad - i’m in NYC this weekend - thru monday: do you have time to get together?
i will answer your question once we talk about it further internally, but in the interim please know that we are happy to offer other solutions:
a. put custom development on the table [your firm could hire us to do the applications you require ergo they become available]
b. we could discuss allowing third-parties access to the spec for internal use [e.g license the spec to you in some way] even if we dont allow it publicly or under some open-source license.
c. um…what else?
cb
We’re here only on weekdays. But if your flight isn’t early on monday, we could do that.
The issue with A will be the support. If Thinkbox goes belly up, we’re stuck with files we cannot read except in “legacy” applications. And we’d have to justify the value of contracting Thinkbox (as opposed to just buying the XMesh licenses outright). Our company considers R&D salaries, software purchasing, and contracting to all be different monies. It’s silly like that.
We’d prefer B. So you don’t release the spec publicly, but license it to us (and other interested customers) under NDA or some other restriction forbidding us from redistributing the spec. We would make plugins for the applications we use, but not the source code or the spec on the format. If we release anything, it would be for free, we wouldn’t make money off it unless there was some revenue sharing agreement. We’d include Thinkbox in the about box / copyright notice and direct all requests for the spec to you. Advantages of this scheme include pushing more people to XMesh. If we end up with a nice setup for moving assets between 3ds max and Unity via XMesh (as opposed to FBX or PC2), someone else could use our Unity plugin to move assets between Maya and Unity. They’d just have to buy your Maya plugin, which generates revenue for you. It’s the network effect, where the value increases as more connections can be made with XMesh.
Maybe you could make XMesh into the Cineform of geometry baking, but it’s an uphill climb to get people to agree to build a pipeline around a product that requires a license to do ANYTHING with it. Like DRM, but for professional use on assets we already own the copyright to. 
- Chad