3D file formats

[kryton9]

Guys, I have been looking into various 3d File Formats and starting to understand a little bit how they work.
Petr, did a great job in giving us a simple file format with M15, I didn't think so at first, but after I see the others... I see what a great job he did.

My main thing is being able to use other packages and get more features. Mike of course wrote the awesome Blender Export script, but not being able to use a standard file format is limiting.

I have looked at Collada and FBX, but they are very rich huge file formats not suitable for games.
Obj is nice, but it doesn't support animation.

This leaves 2 formats, DirectX's X format and 3ds. I am leaning towards 3ds. The reason when I was working with DirectX, not all programs had DirectX exporters, where as everyone seems to have 3ds support. I wanted to see if any of you had used anything else that you would recommend me looking in too. The format should support animation, texture maps, and transparency.

I am thinking of developing a loader and then passing it on to Petr to refine with his tremendous skills.

Here are some things that will be returned, let me know if you guys think of any others.

Bounding Box size
Center of object
Radius of Object (this is used to set the camera so you always see the objects at a good size, clever idea)
The model will support transparency and textures... I found out you draw the model in 2 passes and draw the faces accordingly.

Also I will look into using one of the libraries Jose has converted to powerbasic to allow us to use different graphic file formats, my main interest right now is png as it is a great all around file format that allows everything at a great size.

[Michael Hartlef]

Hi Kent,

about 3DS, I don't know any 3D package that supports the animation parts in 3DS. The file format supports it but I never saw a file that actually contains it. Other file formats that I know are more game related and so mostly not supported out of the box. Like MD2, MD3, B3D, DBO.

[Petr Schreiber]

3DS Max is great program,

but I think most people cannot effort it. And writing format in other than "mother" application is always a bit tricky.
Take for example as simple stuff as OBJ - it could not be simplier, but many programs export it not according to specs.

What is DBO format Mike ?


Petr

[kryton9]

I have been doing lots of reading tonight. I had a made a demo in darkbasic with animated 3ds file I made, but I can't find it :(

Anyways, I see many posts saying that, yes 3ds is nice, but old and you are better using a newer format.

I am now researching perhaps writing a direct x format file importer. I don't know... it is pretty nice is all you can do with it, but I am sure it is a nightmare to import.

MD3, I was thinking about, but you only see characters modeled in it it seems and not much else. Also they seem low poly and not the greatest looking, but I could have just not seen good examples.

Petr, DBO is DarkBasic's Format.

But DBO, B3D are not widely supported like 3ds. Even .x is not as widely supported. I see people saying use collada, I guess you can import it and just make the display list with the parts you need and ignore what you don't.

Everyone says google and I do, but it is getting hard to find useful info on these matters.

I guess I will try to write another 3ds model viewer in Darkbasic and do tests to push it to see how well I can make a model look with it and then determine if it will be worth using it.

Any other ideas?

[kryton9]

Found this: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6664&page=1


So maybe Collada is the way?

[Michael Hartlef]

I say go for collada, it has a future.