Kaydara Inc. announced that the award-winning Kaydara FBX, a platform-independent 3D authoring and interchange format, is now supported by more than 30 industry partners, including Alias, Discreet, Maxon, Newtek, Softimage and Strata. With the community of industry supporters continuing to grow, Kaydara FBX is now considered the de facto 3D interchange format.
"Content reuse and asset exchange between diverse applications is the key to the future of the professional industry, making it possible to eventually expand into the consumer market space," said Michel Besner, president of Kaydara. "Kaydara FBX opens new possibilities and empowers users to create a best of breed pipeline by removing one of the longest standing barriers facing the 3D industry."
Kaydara FBX is a binary file format that supports all the major 3D data elements, as well as 2D, audio and video media elements. It provides access to all the major 3D vendors, which allows artists and production companies to easily work and freely exchange data from multiple software packages.
"Kaydara FBX makes it easier than ever to interact with and move 3D content," said Rob Hoffmann, senior Maya product marketing manager at Alias. "FBX acts as the hub of a wheel allowing 3D artists to move data between different 3D packages. Maya users benefit most from FBX when switching from another software package, and when working in production settings where there are multiple software packages in the pipeline. This type of asset movement is an extremely difficult task without Kaydara FBX."
Previous applications, which have tried to provide the flexibility and freedom of Kaydara FBX, have been unsuccessful because of their inability to provide a total solution that was approved by all the industry players. Therefore, users needed to use multiple exchange applications to move content. FBX has succeeded because of its incredible breadth of supported content, including audio and video, and its vast acceptance by all major applications.
"The Kaydara FBX format is a powerful means of exchanging 3D data between multi-vendor applications," said Maurice Patel, head of product marketing, Discreet. "With today's digital artists requiring tighter integration between 3D and 2D compositing and visual effects, FBX provides a standardized means of bringing the two together with significant benefits to both our 3ds max and our flint, flame and inferno clients."
Kaydara FBX is also available for Apple QuickTime. FBX for QuickTime allows producers and artists to easily visualize and sign off on 3D content using QuickTime. By adding the FBX component to QuickTime, content creators have a completely new way to work with high-end 3D and no longer need to rely on an individual application for their 3D project review or transport. FBX for QuickTime is fully cross-platform and allows both Mac and PC users to visualize as well as interact with 3D content. Combined with QuickTime Pro, FBX for QuickTime provides digital artists with a new media type for authoring, allowing them to combine and composite 3D with video, audio and images from all supported QuickTime formats.
"For us, FBX for Quicktime eliminates unneeded renders, edits and re-renders by allowing us to avoid committing to video until the very end," said Alex Lindsay, chief architect of Pixel Corps. "The files are much smaller, portable, and ultimately decreases the turn-around for approvals which is key to cost-effective production."
FBX can be used as an interchange format between 3D modeling/animation/rendering packages, 3D scanners (hardware), 3D content providers, motion capture systems, camera tracking systems and other applications. Used at production studios for more than six years, FBX has proven itself a versatile, accurate and dependable authoring and data transfer format. Industry supporters for Kaydara FBX include a variety of digital content vendors such as 2D3, 3Dwings, A&G Soluzioni Digitali, Alias, Apple, Ascension Technology, Autodesk, Darwin, Di-O-Matic, Discreet, Luxology, Maxon, Motek, Natural Motion, Newtek, NXN, Okino, Softimage, Strata, TurboSquid, Vicon and Virsys.
Over the course of the past decade, Montreal-based Kaydara (www.kaydara.com) has become a leader in the development of realtime 3D animation software solutions for the entertainment industry. Kaydara's product portfolio serves a vast and varied range of clients in the TV, film, game development and Web content industries.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
