Hoardaxe Posted May 15, 2015 Share Posted May 15, 2015 What are the advantages and disadvantages between the two? Aside from the fact that .nif is clearly proprietary to Gamebryo, what makes it more/less effective than .obj as a means of 3d model storage? I'm talking about usage beyond Skyrim as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kraeten Posted May 16, 2015 Share Posted May 16, 2015 .NIF must be used for a model to appear in Skyrim. There's nothing wrong with other formats, but given that they don't work for Skyrim they're irrelevent for discussion on this forum. If I was going to store my models for usage outside of Skyrim, I'd use .OBJ as I believe there isn't a 3D modelling software in existence that fails to include a import feature for that format. Hope this helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hoardaxe Posted May 16, 2015 Author Share Posted May 16, 2015 (edited) .NIF must be used for a model to appear in Skyrim. There's nothing wrong with other formats, but given that they don't work for Skyrim they're irrelevent for discussion on this forum. If I was going to store my models for usage outside of Skyrim, I'd use .OBJ as I believe there isn't a 3D modelling software in existence that fails to include a import feature for that format. Hope this helps.Wow that was extremely helpfull. I wish there was an upvote button! :smile:))) But I was talking about the .nif characteristics compared to .obj, like what kind of information each file stores and what each file doesn't. I know for certain that .nif can store more types of model features (i.e skeletons, etc) but I'd like a list of what other features it stores that .obj can't. Edited May 16, 2015 by Hoardaxe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ph0rce Posted May 16, 2015 Share Posted May 16, 2015 Wavefront (OBJ) is a purely a geometry format. Its advantage is that it can be read by nearly any piece of software that can read vertex-based files, however it can't store anything beyond vertex/face data and vertex colour data, as well as UV Mapping data. That means no custom coordinate systems, no textures, no shaders, no physics and no material settings (without an external file). It also has no file compression to speak of, which can yield utterly massive files at higher poly-counts. NetImmerse Format (NIF) was originally created by a company called Numerical Design Limited for the NetImmerse Engine (the engine that eventually became Gamebryo, Lightspeed and Creation). NIF supports the same types of data as Wavefront, but also supports full texture and material data, along support for shader effects, verlet physics, havoc physics, and skeletons. There are likely quite a few more features supported by the format, but I'm hardly an expert on the format, so I can't list them off the top of my head. The primary downside of NIF though, is support. Very few pieces of software can read it natively (the most important of those in our particular situation being the games that we work with like Skyrim). The format is also consistantly evolving as Gamebase (current owner of the engine) continues to update it. I believe that Bethesda has modified the format as well to produce the types of nodes used by the Creation Engine. To sum it up: OBJ is an open standard format used for content development which only supports raw data; while useful, there are quite a few formats available which are much more advanced and s a result often supersede it (a good example being Kaydara's FilmBox (FBX)). NIF on the other hand is a proprietary format developed for a specific game engine and all variants of, with limited usefulness beyond the scope of development for those specific engines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrNewcenstein Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 .3DS is actually more useful than .OBJ, in my view, but the problem with the .3DS format is that not every app uses the same Import/Export functions, meaning certain apps cannot access all the features embedded in a given file. The same 3DS mesh imported into Bryce will have different levels of functionality in Truespace, for example. If you wish to see the data types and overall structure of a NIF, open one up in NifSkope and look through the Data windows. If you want to see the guts of an OBJ file, open it in a text editor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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