In defense of OBJ, 3DS, files!

[hoodoo_man]

Hi all,

 

I just realized (well not just) that I'm the one who has been doing the bulk of the complaining about the lack of decent OBJ file support in the new Nifskope, recently at least, and for those who either don't do much modelling, or have a completely different workflow and think OBJ is basically an antiquated, useless format, I wanted to point out why it has stuck around so long.

 

Formats like OBJ (& 3DS for that matter) are antiquated in the sense that they don't hold all of the information of some other formats. However, this is what makes them fairly useful specifically as exchange formats to move geometries between applications. That is their primary function anymore--that and the fact that you can strip everything but the vertex transformations from an OBJ file and you have yourself a morph target ;).

 

JPEG is to a large extent an antiquated file format for images--but we're all stuck with it, and we all use it--because anything will read them. OBJ and/or 3DS (although I don't know as much about 3DS files) are the same way. That, and sometimes it's useful not to have all that weight-painting, vertex shading info in there just to confuse you :P.

 

As an example, I'm primarily a modeller, then a texture painter. If you do much modelling, and you use more than one application--you need a format that will easily exchange between programs. OBJ and 3DS were primarily designed for this. Note that there are very few flawless NIF filters out there despite the best efforts of the NIF team. You can import/export from Blender (I think--I've never used it--python bothered me) or 3DS Max. There are a lot of other modelling programs and utilities.

 

For example, this was my workflow in Oblivion: I would modify or usually create a model in Rhino 3D (because I like Rhino, find it much more intuitive than Max, and really actually like working with NURBS :P). Let's assume we're talking about something simple like a weapon--because I'm a modeller, not an animator--I still view rigging as something of a dark art and terms like "weight-painting" and "inverse kinematics" fill my heart with fear ;).

 

So, having a decent weapon model, I would export from Rhino as a mesh in OBJ format, along with material definitions (which OBJ does hold) designating the parts I wanted to map separately. I would then create a new uv map/s using uvmapper (which is a great utility, has been around forever, and only reads OBJ files!). At that point I had a new geometry, uvmap, and templates for said uvmap to use in Photoshop (or the image editing software of your choice). I would import the re-mapped geometry into 3DS Max basically just to use the NIF export filter--or if I did have to do weight painting :O, as Rhino does not really work with meshes very well. Then I could just copy and paste the new weapon into an existing, good NIF file using Nifskope. I know that sounds convoluted, but it wasn't that bad for modelling while avoiding rigging ;).

 

I could even do weight-painted objects that way--and as long as I didn't screw up the vertex order, they would retain their existing weighting. So, what my main question has been all along--and maybe this was the wrong place to ask it--and I have probably been very unclear--is do any of you use a similar workflow, or at least one involving multiple applications. If so, what format do you use for exchange and what does it retain? If I'm the only one who does this kind of thing, that's cool. I'm just glad you can apparently have multiple versions of Nifskope functioning on your machine at the same time ;). But if somebody does know of a good exchange file format--or a general 3D format conversion package that includes NIF <laughing maniacally>, please, please give me some advice ;).

 

Thank you.

 

Hoodoo Man