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Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

Slight tangent, but does anyone here have recommendations for a good serialization format for 3D models for the web? Think for loading into Three.js. Ideally something that can be converted to/from Collada. It seems like a lot of the standard file formats are quite heavy.

Edit: glTF? Not sure how good tooling is for this yet, but looks promising.

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Gtlf is where we are all headed but you’re right, the tooling hasn’t caught up yet. Google Draco[1] is also an important new development. Compressed meshes and point clouds! It works well and has three.js examples.

I have no idea why no one is talking about Draco anywhere. It’s a hugely important new tool. MPEG for vectors!

I think FBX works well with three.js too.

[1] http://www.github.com/google/draco

Draco looks exactly what I need actually -- thank you!

Shameless plug, the three.js fbx converter supports a number of formats including Collada: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/tree/dev/utils/converters...

Thanks, this looks really useful too! I had no idea it was there.

GLTF is too new to be adopted en masse and too many systems support collada/obj out of the box already to make people switch.

That said, I think it's a great implementation. There are technical roadblocks - most notably that 3D authoring tools (3DSMAX, Cinema4D etc...) don't support export of GLTF natively yet.

Wavefront OBJ, and gzip it if you must.

glTF adoption is growing very quickly - 2.0 was only finished a few months ago and there is lots of tooling already: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF#gltf-tools

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