After what some might describe as an eternity, the FBX team delivers a huge update to the FBX plug-in for QuickTime 7.

For those of you who have never heard of the FBX plug-in for QuickTime, it is a quite a little gem that no 3D user wants to be without. The plug-in works with the Apple QuickTime viewer (freely available at Apple.com) and allows you to load up FBX files. But not in a “I’m going to playback a 2D, linear movie of my FBX file” type of load.
The FBX plug-in for QuickTime is a full fledged real-time 3D player, with animation and OpenGL rendering capabilities. Now you can load up that kick-ass, fully animated, textured and lit 3D sequence that you created in any 3D DCC package that supports FBX exporting. Think of it as a portable 3D viewport that anyone with QuickTime 7 and a video card that supports OpenGL can use.

You can even embed use it to playback embedded FBX files in web-pages!

Here is the announcement:

The Autodesk® FBX® 2006.11.2 Service Pack release, which includes bug fixes and updated plug-ins for the latest 2008 releases of Maya and 3ds Max, will available for download on www.autodesk.com/fbx. This release re-introduces the FBX plug-in for QuickTime 7, a component plug-in for Apple QuickTime that lets you play back and interact with 3D files from any major 3D application inside QuickTime.

Enjoy!

Curtis Garton