converter tools back

(L) [2006/02/06] [fpsunflower] [converter tools] Wayback!

Blender supports a pretty large number of formats out of the box (3ds, obj, ply) [LINK http://www.blender.org/]

It's also fairly easy to write an exporter to your own formats from it with python.



This tool is very handy too (426 formats!):  [LINK http://web.axelero.hu/karpo/]


Between those two I've been able to open most of the models I find online.

(L) [2006/02/06] [tbp] [converter tools] Wayback!

If you're talking about commercial transcoders, then you'll have to walk the walk.


[LINK http://www.righthemisphere.com/products/dexp/]

(L) [2006/02/06] [UlfJack] [converter tools] Wayback!

The 3ds format has certain 16bit limits which are not observed (neither error nor warning) by the 3ds exporter available here:


[LINK http://bane.servebeer.com/programming/blender/index.html] (site currently down it seems)


Scenes with too many triangles (more than 2^16) will be stored in invalid 3ds files. The wavefront alias (obj) file format is plaintext and much safer. And much bigger.  [SMILEY Sad]

(L) [2006/02/06] [UlfJack] [converter tools] Wayback!

Another one that may be interesting is ivcon:


[LINK http://www.csit.fsu.edu/~burkardt/g_src/ivcon/ivcon.html]


It's free and open source. Unfortunately the code doesn't look very good (a single large c file, ugh) and I couldn't get it to keep texture coordinates when i tried it. (Not to speak of any other shading information.)

(L) [2006/02/07] [tbp] [converter tools] Wayback!

Unless you only use 3ds max, you should avoid 3ds like plague indeed.

It varies from version to version, no package ever get the same data out of it and it's full of dependencies regarding how max represents things internally.


Deep exploration does a good job at preserving most info when transcoding 3ds to say Wavefront.


Wavefront can be problematic too (mostly in the way the material lib file gets extended but also with exotic features)... but everyone + his mother can import/export it.

So, use Wavefront to pass data around but pay attention to the features you use.


I restrict them to triangles with normals (+ optionnaly texture coordinates) and it works well.

Obviously that fits my bill (as my rtrt only use triangles) [SMILEY Smile]

(L) [2006/02/07] [UlfJack] [converter tools] Wayback!

One problem with wavefront is that Cinema4D doesn't write material files _at all_.


Enjoy!  [SMILEY Twisted Evil]


PS: And it duplicates texture coordinates on output. We had a file with 300000 vertices and 1.2 million pairs of texture coordinates. (Almost) every vertex was referenced with slightly different texture coordinates - total crap. That caused our converter to output a file with 1.2 million vertices.  [SMILEY Mad]

(L) [2006/02/07] [UlfJack] [converter tools] Wayback!

3ds export is also a problem if you want to do stuff with your geometry - like, say, simplify it with qslim. Because of the 16 bit limits, the exporter may split the geometry up, which means that the vertices are duplicated and the mesh may not be connected anymore. That lost us weeks on my last project.   [SMILEY Mad]