First of all, I'm an artist, not a coder, so possible I simply annoy competent people with my humble opinions. In such a pity case I hereby give my apologizes.
We still need some format for 3D models of units. It was said what StP will employ true 3D graphics, and it is Good Thing as we live in 3D world and think in 3D terms. I found several prerequestives for such a formats, namely following ones:
1) It must be either open or at least supported by open source programs as export option
2) It may be extensible, as we could add some features in the future
3) It would be easy to parse (at least by computers
)
4) It must support explicit uv texture mapping
5) It must be reasonable compact
6) It have to be 3D mesh oriented rather than scene description, freeform surface etc.
While first option may seems questionable, I belibe it's right, as open source programs can't thrive on commertial stuff. Label me open source purist and zealot, but I think so.
Here is a list of 3D formats I think deserves mention:
3DS, ASC 3D Studio data format. Once upon a time, 3D studio consisted from several different programs, like Shaper, Lofter, Keyframer and so on. 3DS was designed to store various sorts of thing in one scene while distinct tool were able to save their own files (Shaper .shp if I correctly remember and so on). Now it's widespread interchange format for 3D mesh data, for historical reasons.
Status: widespread in 3D computing as mesh interchange, development frozen
Origin: commercial, officaly not documented (?)
Format: chunked binary (unit16 tags), little endian, easy to parse; most chunks are obsolete as they were meant to store original 3D Studio stuff, we have to bother with 0x3d3d top-level chunk. There is also plain text (ASCII) .asc
Contents: 3D triangle mesh, no quads, rudimentary surfaces
Texturing: it depends, but in general, it's silly.
Usage: it's relatively easy to read/write and here is opensource library for loading
AC AC3D is shareware 3D editor. IMHO, it ist neither dramaticaly good nor horrible; usable interface, some interesting modeling features, even more vital features are still missing
Status: lurks around, some usage was found in opensource projects, still alive
Origin: commercial, shareware, documented
Format: plain text
Contents: some degenerate subtype of scene graph with parent/kid scheme, materials section + objects section, polygon mesh
Texturing: silly, but may be viewed as existing
Usage: possible easy
BLEND Blender scene file. Not a long ago, Blender was evil commercialware and Nature punished its owners for such a ignorance so they bunkrupt. Then they become more enlightned and opened it (but only after community donation of $100,000 BTW) so Blender is open source once and for all (GPL plus BSD). Blender is one of the best mesh editors I know while its UI is _very_ special and discouraging for unexperienced user. In fact, blender has its own "game" engine inside along with workshop for creating event-driven VR worlds so .blend files have way too much unneeded features.
Status: reincarnated and about to improve
Origin: freed commercial
Contents: lots of things, without much of documentation but with source code
Usage: hard, I think
DXF AutoCAD Drawing Interchange, exchange format used for many CAD/CAM applications, it may in fact store some mesh defenition
Status: in use
Origin: commercial, used for some open source CAD applications, some modelers may export it
Format: plain text
Contents: lots of drawing-related things, including layers, line styles etc. Heavy block structure with somewhat chaotic syntax.
Texturing: no way, AFAIK
Usage: Ugh!
IV Inventor / Open Inventor scene graph. It's almost internal format for SGI own C++ scene graph toolkit, possible useles without Inventor itself but of course it may be used alone, with some pain.
Status: still alive, but not much
Origin: commercial, almost open source later
Format: plain text or binary
Contents: full-blown scene graph with various nodes. Wonder if we can use half of them.
Usage: hard away from Inventor itself but possible may be imported to other scene graph toolkits.
LWO LightWave is one of best commercial 3D workshops I know of, it has simply best mesh modeler out there with lots of useful features, wow! But it's way too expensive...
Status: widespread in professional 3D modeling world and some games, Independance War for example. Healthy.
Origin: commercial, do't know about open source tools saving that files (HELP!), documented
Format: .IFF chunked binary, big-endian, word boundary pad, uint32 tags
Contents: lots of. Point data (vectors) is mapped into vertices then vertex data mapped to polygons. Also include bones, subdiv surfaces, metaballs and some other things along with keyframing, surface and envelope data. Arbitary type mesh (from 0 - sided polygons to infinity).
Texturing: good, really good
Usage: not hard indeed, just keep track of all these chunk types
MDL, MD2, MD3 Quake engines and friends. Supports mesh data, skins and comprehansive animation, this models are almost ultimate choice for any person looking for character models.
Status: legendary
Origin: commercial, but ID seems to throw away and GLPize obsolete code, so old engines are in fact free
Format: binary, of course
Contents: lots of stuff, including mesh data, animation sequences, skinning...
Texturing: exists, and even good
Usage: hard, but most of BSP game engines managed to read it somehow and its code may be stolen.
OBJ, MOD Very old object format used by
Wavefront, it was dislodged from its original birthplace but still in use as interchange format. Open/save by various programs including open source like Art of Illusion.
Status: undead, widespread interchange format
Origin: commercial, documented
Format: plain text, resembles Xfig's .fig or binary(?)
Contents: lines/polygons/curves/surfaces plus some scene graph stubs like object merge and smoothing groups
Texturing: exists
Usage: not too hard
OFF, AOFF Somewhat stale format first introduced by
DEC and later used in some 3D applicatons. Was meant as library and interchange format for storing 3D objects.
Status: waning
Origin: commertial/public, documented
Format: plain text and binary
Contents: polygon mesh, simple material properties and aux info (author etc.)
Texturing: none, AFAIK
Usage: should be easy
V3D Vertex 3D Model Assembler is infamous open source mesh editor. It has somewhat silly UI and some OpenGL-friendly stuff like explicit quad strips, so artist may spend some time optimizing mesh rather making it better. For low-poly models only, IMHO.
Status: lurking around, but possible already sinked
Origin: open source
Format: plain text
Contents: various mesh data along with transformations and surfaces
Texturing: explicit uv
Usage: may be easy, especialy for "raw" OpenGL w/o any toolkit
VR Dive object/actor format, used by one of the oldest VR toolkits out there, and I really saw couple of modeling apps saving this format.
Status: alive(?)
Origin: open source
Format: plain text
Contents: defenitely resembles .vrml (see)
Texturing: yes
Usage: ?
VRML [i]Virtual Reality Markup Language[/b], in fact it's another one scene markup language specialy crafted for low download times rather than eye candy or feature richness. It comes in 3 flavors, namely versions 1, 2 and 97, but the later pair is almost identical. Here is another upcoming format called x3d featuring stream-oriented server communications, more interactivity etc. OK, it is't model format but it can be abused to do so.
Status: wide(?)spread and evolving
Origin: both open and closed source, well supported and documented, read/write by almost any modeler
Format: plain text, usualy gzip'ed
Contents: some degenerate scene graph plus auguments like animation, events and hyperlinks.
Texturing: yes, but do't expect much
Usage: possible, especialy ignoring all other than mesh data
All other formats I forgot.
IMHO, specific format to work with may be selected as consensus between coder and artist groups as both groups are interested in various aspects of choice in question.
Targon out.
Saves BLEND, DXF and VideoScape (?!)
So which ones are your personal favourites right now?
, my vote is for 3ds
