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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Ha, awesome:

  - 41% of models are OBJ
  - 21% of models are BLEND
  - 14% of models are DAE

Let's hear it for simple, awesome text formats!

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DAE is not simple. .blend is not text.

I think GP was referring to .OBJ with its 41% share of the site's models.

And that, more than anything else, is why we should all use OBJ for static meshes whenever possible.

In a past life, I worked on .dae import/export code--COLLADA is almost a parody of everything you can do to overengineer (badly) a file format.

I don't understand why people fail to grasp that, for static meshes, we solved the problem decades ago; I say this having done the exact same thing many times reinventing a compact binary rep.

EDIT: As a colleague points out, yes, sometimes for assets OBJ is not optimal; I contend however that for interchange it's pretty good.

In practical terms, right now FBX rules and we can hope that DAE will replace it (right now most DAE support is via the FBX libraries, so let's not all hold our breath). OBJ is great for simple geometry and UVs, but kind of hopeless beyond that.

Text formats can be downright huge, however. I've worked with quite a few meshes that exceed 100s of megabytes when stored as obj, but compress down nicely in binary. What we really need is a simple binary obj file. It would be a no-brainer to develop a binary variant of obj. This would be marginally more difficult to parse, but drastically smaller. Either that or convince Autodesk, SideFX, The Foundry, Blender, and others to read in .gz'ed versions of obj files.

It appears that .zip is the standard for binary OBJ. That way associated textures and materials can easily be included in the zip.

http://clara.io will happily import and export obj inside of zip, along with a lot of other formats.

so does sketchfab and it even works with 7z or rar archives

OBJ is simple enough that I wrote an OBJ import/export/view tool for an entry-level computer graphics course. That's pretty damn awesome, I can't think of too many other file formats that simple that are useful in so much industry software.

[Wavefront] OBJ is dead. Long live OBJ!

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