3D File Formats

This article is discussing the most economical and best 3D file formats. This tutorial is very useful for the beginners and are in a state of confusion to select the best 3D file formats.  Here is very basic information about most common 3D file format to transport data among different applications.

1. 

   Structure of COLLADA Document

   COLLADA .dae File : COLLADA (Collaborative Design Activity) file is used as an intermediate format to transport 3D model data from one tool to another application. Many modern 3D applications provide support to use COLLADA format. COLLADA defines an open standard XML schema for exchanging digital contents among many applications and facilitate’s to encode visual scenes including geometry, physics, shaders, effects, animations, kinematics, multiple representations of the same object and guarantees the careful delivery of between applications. COLLADA can deal with scene graph along with many other objects. COLLADA acts as a glue to bind 3D process and DCC tools into a production pipeline.

   • Libraries : COLLADA libraries hold many type of objects such as <animation>, <camera>,<code>,<controller>, <geometry>,<image>, <light>
   • Assets : COLLADA documents and objects inside the document can be marked as an assets and can managed
     

     Assets

   • 

     Geometry and Model

     

     Scene

     meta information.

   • Models & Geometry : Geometry can contain multiple streams of data at each vertex.
   • Scene Description : COLLADA scene describes the scene graph or a hierarchy of objects
2. Wavefront .obj File : Developed by Wavefront and it’s a universally accepted format for 3D graphics. It formats 3D data in a simple format as 3D geometries e.g. each vertex, position of each vertex, position of each texture, faces that make each polygon.e.g information of a vertex is stored like . v 0.123 0.234 0.345 1.0 Texture Coordinates vt 0.500 1 [0]
3. Ogre 3D .mesh.xml File : You can read about Ogre 3D from my previous article posted here.