Blender Format

[Berniece Domnick]

Sometimesyou may want to utilize files that either came from other 2D or 3D software,or you may want to use the things you have made in Blender and edit them in other software.Luckily, Blender offers a wide range of file formats (e.g. ABC, USD, OBJ, FBX, PLY, STL, etc.)that can be used to import and export.

To start with I would be happy if I could just grab single float values for each PBR channel for materials that arent using any complex node setups, but rather just the artist dragging the sliders directly on the principled bsdf node or even better would be if I could get the PBR channel values from the material output (so it would work no matter what kind of shader nodes are used in the material).

Alternatively if I can somehow extract GLSL from Blenders nodegraph and use some GLSL > HLSL converter and use that in Unreal Engine (tho this sounds a bit more complicated so Im not 100% sure if this would make a good solution for this project).

The reason for me asking about the .blend file format is just that I were digging around a bit about file formats yesterday after hearing that Send to Unreal currently uses Blenders fbx exporter and then just automating the import process in Unreal engine (which I thought sounded a little strange as theres so much data Blenders fbx exporter cant parse). After talking with one of the developers/maintainers on there Github he did say that fbx is not written in stone, so it seems there is the possibility of changing this to something that can handle more data types and one of the things that then came to mind was if one could maybe fetch any data as you like directly from the .blend file - making the only limit for what can be exported basically the time and effort we put into the project.

I should probably also say that I might be looking into adding support for exporting scene lights (with as many of its properties as possible) from Blender to Unreal - so having some kind of unified solution for fetching data from Blender would be nice.

It can be used as a standalone executable to inspect .blend files (and their DNA). For Windows I do provide .msi installers in the download section of this two websites:

A bit of background for this topic: Alembic is not a single file format, it can be stored in two different ways: Ogawa and HDF5. Ogawa replaced HDF5 and is smaller and much faster (4-25x) to read (source).

Hmm it sounds like there is something corrupt in the file.

How did you append the file?

Did you try to append only the objects?

Instead of appending the whole file try double clicking the file (in the append dialog) then in the objects folder select all the objects and click append.

im having the same problem like the SAME problem there is nothing on the append its 4.750kb and it crashes when i try to open the file from folder and blender says that it doesnt support the file format and its on 3.6.0 so this isnt just for 1 vercion i think it might be able to happen in every vercion

Very happy for you ! File corruption is extremely rare with Blender, but it happens, like, once a decade. It happened to me when my machine crashed while saving. This is why keeping file increments is essential. I keep about a hundred versions of my current assets. Once in a while (or at the end of a project) I purge it all, but even then I always keep a duplicate or two around.

I work as a 3D Designer and we use blender to visualise products. Blender is the worst program I have ever used in terms of saving and reusing old saves. Corrupting files is happening quite often. I would say probable once at 10 projects, a file is corrupted.

I know that Blenders FBX exporter is sometimes problematic, you might find you will have some issues with it (smoothing groups information and things like that). What I would do is export as OBJ from Blender then use Autodesk FXB Converter 2013 which is free.

I've found a model on a site that I'd like to use but it doesn't come in a Blender format, so having never purchased a model before I'm just wondering which format I should buy? The formats available are .3ds, .dxf, .obj, and .max. Are they all essentially the same? I've seen in the Add-ons that these can all be imported, but I don't want to waste my money on one that won't work properly etc., so is there a type that's known to work better?

If that is not the case, then do not buy the 3DsMax (.max) file, since it's a closed file format specific for AutoDesk 3DSMax and you will not be able to easily open it without an active license.

If you really have to make a choice either go with the .OBJ or the .3DS file formats, which are some of the most common and Blender as native official importers for both. Collada and FBX should be fine too for more complex stuff including animations.

OBJ is generally regarded as a more modern and advanced file format, it is well supported in most 3D packages (in case you need to open it elsewhere in the future) and also supports the most features compared to .3ds which is more basic and limited, so I'd say OBJ is likely the best from the bunch.

Beware that modern versions of Blender no longer include a .3ds import plugin by default. You may be able to download a third party one from the internet, but it is an additional step you'll have to deal with.

FileInfo.com describes a BLEND file as a 3D image or animation project created with Blender, an open-source 3D modeling program, and saved in a proprietary binary format. A BLEND file contains 3D mesh data, lighting information, vertex painting, animation keyframes, NURBS objects, procedural textures, UV mapping layout, and real-time interactivity data. BLEND files also contain imported assets, such as objects, sounds, images, effects, scenes, users only need to provide the BLEND file to share a Blender project.

The Blender program is a free, multiplatform application for creating various 3D productions, including models and animations. As of this writing, Blender 3.4.1 is the current version to download for Windows, but options for macOS, Linux, and other platforms are available.

Blender Developer Wiki provides information for developers, including explanations of code directories and design documentation, modules, style guides, and new release updates. An archived version of the Blender Developer Wiki, Code Documentation describes the basis of the BLEND file format. The documentation is based on the document The Mystery of the Blend, June 2010, written by Jeroen Bakker, using a default BLEND file from Blender 2.48 as a working example.

BLEND files organize data in various data-blocks, such as objects, meshes, or materials. The data-blocks can be linked together and referred to each other within the same BLEND file or other BLEND files creating reusable resource libraries.

BLEND files save data in-memory to disk without any translations or transformations, it only adds file-block-headers to the data which contain information on how to interpret the data. Blender structures are stored after the data with the structures acting as blue-prints when the BLEND file is loaded.

In 2020 Blender has been downloaded over 14M times from In addition to blender.org, Blender is available on other platforms such as the Microsoft Store, Steam and Snapcraft. Microsoft Store and Snapcraft provide information on the amount of installed Blender releases.

In Blender, 3D models can be built with different object types such as a mesh, curve, surface, metaball, text, grease pencil, armature, lattice, image, and camera. Some types of modeling in Blender are polygonal mesh modeling and curve-based modeling. Meshes are the most common type of modeling object used in Blender. Bzier and NURBS curves, defining curves through a mathematical formula, are the basic curve-based forms included in Blender.

BLEND supports UV mapping, mapping 2D textures on 3D objects, a process done in a UV editor. The UV unwrapping tool flattens out the model surface so the texture can be painted on. Uses can adjust opacity, diffusion, light reflection, or back-lighting.

Each BLEND file can contain multiple scenes, which can share and link to other scenes, objects, and/or materials. Scene properties define the nature of the scene, including active camera, background scene, units of measurement, strength of gravity, audio settings, and rigid body objects.

BLEND files support animations with lattice modifiers, rigging (skeleton), and inherited animation (movement based on another object). Animation is typically achieved using keyframes that define positions of the starting and ending point of a specific transition, with a sequence of the transitions making up a complete animation.

A BLEND1 file is a backup file automatically generated by Blender. It stores a copy of the previously saved version of the currently opened .BLEND file and is used for recovering the previous version of a BLEND file. BLEND1 files can be renamed with the ".blend" extension and opened normally. BLEND1 files may be accompanied by other ".blend2," ".blend3," etc. files. These files are generated based on the number of allowed save backups the user specifies in the application preferences. Note that ".blend2" is an older version of the Blender file than the ".blend1" file.

This document only describes the encoding of binary FBX files, not the interpretation of the data being encoded.

It should enable you to translate binary FBX files to ASCII text format (or an in-memory representation of it).

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