[osg-users] [osgPlugins] Which model format to use? FBX vs. VRML

[Praveena Sara]

Hi,

My requirements:
Models should have keyframe animations in them
Have textures
Should be modeled and exported using 3Ds Max

I hope to use either FBX or VRML models. What are the pros and cons of each model?

Thanks.

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[Jan Ciger]

Hello,

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Praveena Sara <prav...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

My requirements:
Models should have keyframe animations in them
Have textures
Should be modeled and exported using 3Ds Max

I hope to use either FBX or VRML models. What are the pros and cons of each model?

Stay away from VRML if you can - it is a long obsolete format, very verbose and difficult to parse and it is not intended as a data exchange format, rather it is everything and the kitchen sink system - meshes, scene layout description, animation, interactive features, sound, what not. Furthermore, OSG loader for VRML doesn't support full VRML, only a small subset useful for loading geometry (e.g. animations are *not* supported). Also the VRML exported by Max is of rather poor quality, not following the standard in some ways.

FBX requires closed source, proprietary SDK if I remember correctly, but I haven't tried using it.

If you are targetting an OSG application, you have a decent native OSG format exporter available for Max. That is likely your best bet, IMO.

Regards,

Jan

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hello,

> I hope to use either FBX or VRML models. What are the pros and cons
> of each model?

I will echo Jan's suggestions and add a bit more info.

VRML support is pretty bad in current content creation tools (I've
tested with Max and Maya primarily). The problem is mostly the way
things are represented is different for each tool's exported VRML, and
the amount of things in your scene that will make it into OSG is pretty low.

FBX is a bit better I have found. Both Max and Maya's exported FBX files
have pretty good coverage of what is in your scene, and the OSG FBX
loader is pretty good (and its primary author Michael Platings has been
very responsive in the past, though it's been a while since I've seen
him post on the list).

Jan's suggestion to go with a native exporter is spot-on. the Max
exporter osgExp is very good, as is the Maya exporter osg2maya (just
google those names). Their authors are (or have been) regular posters on
this list, so bugs or things broken by changes in OSG's API (though
infrequent) are normally quickly fixed. And the advantage of getting an
OSG file directly is very interesting, you can write scripts that will
add information to nodes directly in Max and things like that.

Essentially, this advantage is huge. You go directly from Max or Maya to
.osg format, there is no intermediate format in between where
information can get lost in the conversion... Whoever makes the models
in Max or Maya has much better control over how their work will look in
the final application, because the translation is direct, there's no
need to figure out by trial and error which feature is not supported
that makes it look like that and how to work around these limitations.

Hope this helps,

J-S
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