:qu:
in the whole wide world?
.life
Edit: (in the 3d world):
.humor
including Bayonne New Jersey?
.rar
other than that, probably obj since it’s simply vertex data and no fluff (like an FBX for example).
Would think obj also, seems to be the universal object type file.
But am confused .rar is a way of saving groups of file, similar
to zip.
Have downloaded many .rar files that had nothing to do
with 3d???
A 3D file format is only as good as the purpose it serves. There are plenty of 3D programs that can save their in-memory 3d file structures to disk. Because many of these 3D programs have implemented their own memory managers, these can be highly efficient binary files… squeezing a 300 meg obj down to a 10 megabyte file. That being said, since these are memory dumps, only one or two programs will be able to open the file format.
Of the widely used file formats, there is one camp that advocates binary file format (3DS etc) due to efficiency (both in computer parsing and filesize). Another camp advocates more human readable formats such as OBJ and and Collada (XML) since a compiler could conceivably convert these to binary formats if needed. A human readable format typically has more cruft leading to huge filesizes, but can be zipped if necessary.
Every application has its requirements, and if you want the BEST performance, its quite rewarding to design your own binary file format. But even in game development, most people use a lingua franca or intermediate file format like Collada that artists can use to exchange production assets. Only in the very very end is the 3d stuff converted to the game platform binary format to optimize runtime performance.
To keep up the good work and not refer to the original question by any means… here some trivia:
http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/edition3/lingua2.3.html
haha sry! my answer was bad, thanks for catching that lemmy. ok, here is a off the top of my head example:
60-80 mB *.ZTL to
300ish mB *.OBJ to
600ish mB *.DAE (collada) to
N/A *.3DS (reg 3DS cannot store more than 65k verts)
300ish mB binary *. STL (200meg if you’re not cutting quads into tris)
15 mB Zipped Custom Memory Dump Format
so I dunno… ztl is pretty good in my book?
Yeah, ztl is one of the most compact formats I’ve seen so far.
Is the ztl format documented anywhere?. I asked google and it said “no”.
In any case, we are comparing apples with oranges here. Some formats are database description files (Collada) which contain vastly more information than others (animation etc…), while others are memory dumps of optimized data structures (Zbrush). While one can write a parser/importer/exporter for Collada, there is no publicly available information regarding the majority of proprietary vendor specific formats. There is no real answer to the original question because there are no comparable formats.
Lemo
What was the question again?
hopefully this helps… I use milkshape 3D as a converter when ripping out 3d meshes from game engines for mods and stuff. It has an extensive list of file formats which I assume are either cracked or have open specifications, its a good list to browse to see what people are using. the quake format (md2, md3, mdl, etc) is a widely used binary format in other open source 3d projects such as papervision3d.
here’s the file list:
http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/index.html
ogre3d is an open souce 3d engine that has a vast variety of importers and exporters to and from its own file format. its been awhile since I looked at ogre but it might be based on the *.x directx mesh format. Which is similar to obj in syntax so its probably around the same size.
the half life 2 mdl/smd compiler is also a good reference (and small in size) but you’re better off sticking to a file format that are officially open spec.