Introduction

I will be moderating a panel discussion on 3D Commerce at 8:00AM PDT (GMT-0700) on Tuesday. 27 October. Registration and attendance for this Zoom Webinar is free!

Recently there has been discussion about the suitability of various 3D formats as an archive format, especially for models. There are formats that have been around a long time (OBJ, FBX, X3D), those that are optimized for delivery (glTF), those that are widely used in existing tool chains (OBJ and FBX), plus a number of other criteria and formats including tool-specific (Blender, Maya, etc.). The most widely used format is FBX and any format that seeks to supplant it needs to offer at least as much capability as that one.

WIth 3D/VR becomming practical in the web browser there are a lot of questions concerning the right format to use for various situations. This post looks at two model formats - X3D and glTF. Both formats support full geometric surface modeling, but there are differences between these formats for some specific areas.

 The big announcement this month from Khronos is Blender now exports glTF models. Things makes a very large collection of models now available for use in web pages with libraries like XSeen.