What are the usual tools for importing models and animations?

Question

I'm a total noob with regard to game programming (though not a noob to programming) and I'm using pygame + opengl to do some experiments with a little game I've been thinking of.

I've been trying to import OBJ files into my pygame OpenGL "game", but there's apparently different formats of OBJ files, and writing a loader is a fairly nontrivial process. At least from my experience, which is not too large.

So I guess my question is: What do people generally use in the industry to read 3d model files? What about animation? Is there a place I can look into to understand?

Thanks, Marcelo.

Answer 1

Reading your comment,Malvin, was better to post this as a new answer:

Malvin, OBJ is quite used for static models. But for character animations, you need to be able to transport bones information, and vertex weights (the value with which each vertex is influenced by several bones, or only one, or none). Also constraints info, in some cases. That all would be the "rigging" info, basically. Then there's animation info needed, like keyframes (frames where some change happens), interpolation type between them, etc, etc. All these is not supported by OBJ. A good, lightweight and practical format for this is *.md5 , but is probably more recommended Collada, which is becoming a very adopted standard and that can port everything, from statics, scenery, to character animation. It is supported by the big ones: Maya, Max, XSI. Blender is supporting it but not yet fully. The collada issue is that is complex to make yourself a loader, as is a very complete format, and for this reason, several packages don't have a fully functional exporter for this. Still, might be the way to go.

You can of course dump OBJ frames from an animation package, and then interpolate in the engine, as exporting one obj per frame would be too much heavy and costs memory. Maybe one every 2 or 4 frames...

You can also use FBX for character animations, but my advice would be using collada instead of it.

First of all, check if your artists are going to be able to export in whatever the format, from their package. Otherwise is a hard to solve problem. Indeed, make complete tests of features ported and and confirm is working in your engine.

About what people is doing, in my experience, all of this... But in game companies, often just they do a converter from whatever format to a custom, native, binary format for their engine. Optimized and faster to load, etc.

I have done prototypes or even games just using OBJ or ASE and md5 for animations..Depends on artists workflows, toolset, etc.

Edit: Sorry, seems Fuzzy had already answered several matters. Agreeing there.

Answer 2

You should use existing options that someone else has already fought.

1) http://assimp.sourceforge.net/ Open Asset Import Library supports a huge amount of formats.

2) http://openctm.sourceforge.net/ A very nice LZMA based mesh compression system with SDK's.

Also, "industry" usually use what they have in their toolset. Collada is common, FBX is common, Proprietary formats even more so. Some studios use .MAX directly, maya scenes directly. Alot of studios also go for transport formats (see opaque data, and such) where the animation software is extended via tools and plugins to feature the game ready tools, instead of working backwards from a mesh format.

For example, Naughty Dog use Maya exclusively as their main 3d content tool See this link : http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?linkID=10225710&id=7670571&siteID=123112

Answer 3

Writing a loader for OBJ models shouldn't be too hard. Its one of the simpler model formats out there. You only have to use what you need and if you are making your own models you can tailor what is exported to only what you need.

I believe there is only one OBJ format, but each file can have parts omitted depending on what the model requires. One model might not use texture coordinates, so they would be missing in the file for example.

Basically your loader would look something like this:

for all lines in file
 Read next non empty line
  Get first token
   if token is #, skip line
   else if token is v, make a vertex
   else if token is vn, make a normal
   else if token is vt, make a texture vertex
   else if token is f, make a face

You would store a list of vertices, normals, texture vertices, and faces. Each face would store indices into the other lists.

Most simple models would not have more than that, even though the OBJ format can handle curves and other non polygonal data. I would bet you don't want to handle any thing else either.

http://www.royriggs.com/obj.html is a good page to look at specifically for OBJ files.

What model format is used in a project depends on the engine used. For example, if you use Unreal, they have a model converter that converts model files from a 3d modeler into the unreal format. If you use a custom engine, you would probably have written your own model format, or at least your own model reader.