glTF discussion

I was researching glTF and Unity to help me decide whether to support the format but i have not found much. If anyone can answer or provide insight into some of the following, it would be much appreciated:

Does Unity ever plan to support the file format? If not, why not?
How 'ready' are the community plugins? I see that many have discussions about certain models that are not working. Is this a problem inherent with the format where there is always likely to be failing fringe cases or is it just early days for the developers? Maybe i am getting the wrong impression from bug reports and fail cases are actually quite rare.
Are the open source solutions worth while? It seems the paid solutions are furthest ahead but i worry what happens if the developer stops working on them.

 

One of the developers posted (links below) commenting on the format stating that it's currently best as a last mile format rather than one that is intended to be used to transfer it between content creation applications due to the apparent possibility that some of the original information may be lost in the process (just like a JPEG introduces artifacts into the image it stores).

Seeing how long it took for Unity to finally decide to create an editor for Linux it's understandable that a format with a limited ecosystem and interest from developers would see slow adoption from Unity. Linux was far more popular than glTF when they finally decided to take it seriously as a development platform.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ce-collada-and-fbx.499223/page-3#post-5251445
https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ce-collada-and-fbx.499223/page-3#post-7030402

 

Khronos recommends to use Collada for authoring interchange and glTF should be used for run-time delivery.

COLLADA Overview - The Khronos Group Inc

(at the bottom is a summary)

 

Khronos GLTF and KTX2 Textures are OpenSource shrinked 3D into GLB.
Game Engines could support this to provide small download and Loading time, but also to reduce loading to Gpu by using also less memory for Jpg+Png.
Blender offers that already lot of features compressed good levels, read:
https://www.khronos.org/ktx/
http://github.com/KhronosGroup/3D-Formats-Guidelines/blob/main/KTXArtistGuide.md
Saves Complex: Rotation and cross position axis 0.999Float cm unit than problem/ver Fbx, than new power of
GLTF/GLB improves use of hardware ressources also battery: 3D Graphics; What do you think? GLTF + KTX2 = GLB

 

When you import image assets into Unity they are converted into platform appropriate formats. It only keeps the original formats to make it easy for the developer. It doesn't actually use them. Therefore the disadvantages you mentioned don't exist for Unity.

Unreal has a similar approach but they have augmented it even further thanks to their acquisition of Oodle which developed high performance compression techniques like Kraken.

All of the above applies to mesh data too.

On paper this sounds like a good idea but in practice companies that create their own game engines have long ago thought of these problems and implemented solutions for them. I used to love following Khronos but at some point I came to the realization that they are perpetually behind everyone else.