"Generic" model formats? Thread

Image formats are fairly generic and widely supported. Jpegs, pngs and bmps can be opened in pretty much anything, with tga and tiff being for the image format connoisseur. Even psd can be opened by many graphics programs.

However, 3D models are a mess of proprietary formats, broken import and export tools, and compatibility issues. I'm wondering, is there a model equivalent of png and jpg? If so, what is it? I guess you can count this post as 2 parts frustrated rant, 1 part asking for advice.

To cut a long story short, a friend wanted a character to be put into Left 4 Dead 2, and possibly Killing Floor. The model and texture work was already done, all I needed now was to rig and export... This is where my frustration began. If you've ever tried to get source engine models out of blender, chances are you know what I'm talking about. I considered buying an old shareware program from back in the day called Milkshape, but I don't know if the original model can be imported.

One of the reasons I picked unity for my engine of choice for a game I'm working on is because I'm sick of dealing with the import-export issues of other engines, and unity will take pretty much anything. If I put a crumpet in the disk tray it could likely read it. However, a guy I know likes .obj format, but for whatever reason it ignores the smoothing options on import. Not sure if that's a unity thing or a .obj thing. I also have a friend who does 3D art, but prefers 3DSmax. This could add another wrinkle to the proceedings if we decide to team up.

I'm not using much in the way of advanced features, so I don't care to much if a format doesn't support feature x, but I would like the process to as painless as seamless as possible. ...or, you know, maybe every game or program going forward doesn't need it's own proprietary model format. Just saying.

Edited by: SabreXT

Unity takes a given common format, converts it to FBX, if it can, and then integrates it in the project.
FBX is the equivalent png for animated 3D models. Collada 1.5 is like the .jpg.

Also, Blender is a very good software for making models in a lot of different formats.
Finally, I never worked with the Source Engine from Valve; as you, I prefer CryEngine or Unity 3D.

Edited by: Taamalus

The "generic" model formats are OBJ & LWO (Lightwave). Those seem pretty standard across the board. However, just like image formats, specific end user programs (ie games) normally use their own.

There's nothing as standardized as jpg for 3d models. There's too many conflicting requirements (do you want materials? how are your bones ordered? Do we want support for defining triangles as stripts? Do we want indexing?)

As for your specific situation, FBX seems to be the way to go as I think all the modeling programs you describe export it and it's relatively standardized now.

Also isn't there some sort of plugin for blender to make exporting to Source SMD's easy these days? I could have sworn I heard about people using it.

I am using Collada 1.4 and the Open Asset Import Library :-)