Standard / Open formats for 3d animation?

General Discussions
#1

I’m a bit out of the loop for 3d formats - what’s a good export/runtime format for 3d animation (with joints and skinning)?

By “good” I mean something that plenty of tools like Maya and Blender have exporters to, not a source file format, and is reasonably sane and feature-complete (ie. contains polys, joints, keyframes, user channels, etc). FBX has been mentioned a few places, but I’ve not looked into it much.

Alternatively, how’s Collada support these days? Should I be exporting to Collada and then converting to a custom binary format for actual runtime use?

#2

you could use anim8or an8.

#3

Could you elaborate on that? It doesn’t seem to fit the criteria of having exporters for anything other than Anima8or.

#4

Collada is a nice format for data exchange between tools but its support is really good in Blender only in recent versions… in which most of exporters and importers for lots of formats used in the mod community are simply broken.

#5

The plan for libgdx is to use GamePlay (or the FBX SDK) to convert FBX and Collada into something sane.

#6

My votes for FBX via the FBX SDK as well. That’s what Unity does, and Gameplay SDK has code that actually works (needs some massaging). I’m planning on finishing a sort of command line converter that takes FBX/OBJ/Collada and exports to a binary/text format. I’m polling the JME guys for input on that, if you have any input i’m glad to hear it!

#7

Is the FBX format so complicated that the SDK is the only way to access it? Or are there additional reasons I’m not seeing?

#8

It’s proprietary, and owned by autodesk.

#9

Hi just yesterday I had the following in my stream, some company developed a converter of several formats(collada, fbx …) to JSON(they did it to use i with ThreeJs)

It doesn’t support skeletal animations yet, but I would bet on this project support wise.