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When a “feature” is worse than a bug

When a “feature” is worse than a bug

2 comments

·November 4, 2025
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CrazyStat

The author claims that the model importing incorrectly in Blender is Sketchfab's fault:

> Why? Because of …Sketchfab.

But he also admits that Blender's USD importer has issues:

> Sure, you can say that Blender’s USD importer is dumb, and that Sketchfab doesn’t actually remove anything, it just reshuffles and repackages stuff.

and that Apple's viewer imports it fine:

> P.S. Why does Apple’s built-in Viewer handle it just fine? I guess it’s because it understands the format on a much deeper level. Since USDZ is a technology originally developed by Pixar and Apple, the macOS viewer’s parser can correctly read even the most twisted USD file.

Given these facts, it's not at all clear to me that Sketchfab's processing step has anything to do with the incorrect import. Would the original version of the same model, as it was uploaded to Sketchfab before processing, import correctly into Blender? I don't know, but it seems very plausible that the answer is no.

This mostly seems to be an ad for the author's company.

ddkto

The example usda data has a prim named `…_fbx` which suggests that maybe the original author uploaded an FBX file, and skechfab converted it to USD.

If sketchfab is converting the file format, it’s not so surprising that they get into the internals of the file.