Universal 3D File Format In The Works

telstar writes "The Register is reporting that more than 30 companies are working together to define a new file format intended to serve as a universal 3D file format. The new file format will be named the 'Universal 3D Format', or U3D. According to the article, they hope to make the new format as standard as MP3 has become for audio, and JPEG has become for 2D images. Interesting that they would choose two lossy media formats as models for comparison."

Comments

What about VRML

[spiritraveller]

Why haven't I heard anything about that 3d format in the past 5 years.

Is it not scalable or something?

I was always under the impression that it was as open as html.

Re:What about VRML

[stratjakt]

I was going to ask the same thing. VRML was going to replace the web with cool virtual environments, there was once a whole lot of buzz around it.

I would like to know what's lacking in VRML. A lack of foresight (didnt plan ahead for programmable pixel shaders, funtional textures, etc)?

And if it's that sort of problem, how can this new format not fall into the same traps, since the authors likely don't have magical crystal balls that tell them what types of information GPUs of the future will want to store.

Re:What about VRML

[soricine]

as an architecture student, i have spent considerable time working on 3d modelling, and have experimented with vrml. the reason that neither i nor any of my fellow-students used it for anything important is because it is ugly. everything is optimised way too far (i know you can vary the optimisation, but to get it to work realtime, it has to be pretty minimal).

key difference: vrml is for realtime 3d.

interesting note: more students have had success with using the unreal engine to model spaces. it is much prettier, and the navigation is better.

One forming defacto standard...

[Mantrid]

Kaydara Motionbuilder (.fbx I think) files seem to be becoming one of the defacto standard file formats for 3D - it stores mesh, bone, and UVW/texture information (to my knowledge), as well as animation info and most of the major apps now have Kaydara support.

Blender support

[TexasDex]

I certainly hope this will be a royalty-free (as in beer) and restriction free (as in speech) format.

But...

One restriction I wouldn't mind, however, is the same sort of compatibility requirement that JAVA has: If something follows the format, it MUST follow it exactly and have no proprietary extentions. This tripped up MS when they tried to hijack JAVA for their own nefarious purposes.

Just my views on this...

Re:Really bad examples to pick...

[cptgrudge]

Let's hope U3D is able to stay clear of such entanglements. Having a patent involved in a file format makes it questionable if FOSS can legally use the format.

In the first line of the article, it says that Microsoft is involved with developing the format. Maybe I'm cynical, but I have little to no faith that this will come out as an open standard. We all know about Microsoft's SOP with respect to actual open standards that they've "enhanced". With them in on the ground floor on this one, I think it's doomed to be proprietary.

Could be good

[JaxWeb]

It is annoying when given a 3D engine, it cannot load a 3D Format which happens to be the only one that your 3d Modeller can export to. I would be happy for that problem to disappear!

But how general will it be? If it can handle detailed CAD models, and open landscape, and UT2003 style maps, high polygon characters and so on, then will it end up being unspace-effective for all of them?

Is there a reason why right now 3DS seems to be the nearest to a standard we have, when it doesn't even have many features?

JPEG might be the standard for images, but it isn't used for everything: Sometimes PNG and TIFF are used for particular reasons. TGA and PNG for example support Alpha channels, while JPEG does not. My friend draws pictures, and sometimes she gets good compression with JPEG, but sometimes the quality loss is terrible. Sometimes GIF is better, or something PNG is. And then there are vector graphics.

MP3 is nearly a standard, but we use OGG for political/legal reasons, or a lossless format when that is important. Real is often used when the sound needs to be streaming.

So, really, how useful will this standard be? And how free?

As one person Reluctantly in the 3D industry

[eadint]

Actually i really hope that his works.
about a year ago i started doing 3D animations, this year i wanted to buy a collection of 3D models but in the end i found that 1 the app that i use has terrible support for model importing (blender) and 2 there are two many different formats out there. someone previosly mentioned 3ds but thats the stupidest thing ive ever heard because 1 its proprietary 2 it sucks. the closest thing to a standard is the .obj format. but even blender has a hard time with uv mapping in that area. as far as lossy, there is no such thing, 3d models dont work that way a model has so many meshes so many polygons and so many textures, how you choose to render it determines the lossyness of it. nut a u3d standard would be great because than i could buy models from anyone and know they would work.
and for the 3ds guy your modeling software sucks and is a POS.

Re:.3ds

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You have an excellent point, but if the company choses to change the format, that causes hell until all the other apps can keep up, granted, users of this kind of program are generally a lot more savvy than those of MS Office, it is still a pain to remember to "save as...". It definitely happens in many version changes of AutoCAD, AutoDesk at one time owned 3D Studio, and I don't think that is necessarily out of their system.

I fail to see how this will be successfull...

[SwansonMarpalum]

As there are so many different ways to represent the geometric structure of a 3D object that tie to the engine rendering that object. The fact of the matter is that 3D graphics rendering is still a non-trivial problem which requires optimizations for the use in question. Just about any piece of hardware still in use can handle JPEG and MP3 without a notable performance hit.

3D applications still push the limits of the hardware they run on and are keyed for specific intents; 3D games sacrifice detail and accuracy of modeling the interaction of light on surfaces for speed, while povray and RenderMan go for full hardcore ray tracing to make sure each pixel on the screen is accurately representing a reflective light model to the capacity of their respective engines.

Sadly, I don't think this arena has trivialized to a one size fits all format yet.

Re:It might be something like this:

[Mithrandir]

Not at all. U3D is actually just the Shockwave3D file format that Intel are trying to ram through a standards body somewhere.

They originally tried to do this through the Web3D consortium (the owner of the VRML standard) under the guise of a CAD format. After a lot of manipulation of the members and several other very dodgy things, the consortium told Intel to get lost. It's now just popped up again under another guise. The laughable thing is that this file format is completely inappropriate for CAD requirements. It's somewhere between a scene graph file format and a programming API, with neither being particularly good. For example, it's not extensible and has a lot of hardcoded strategies. If you wanted to extend or change an iimplementation of one item in the modifier chain, it would require complete reimplementation of the entire system. For example, changing the humanoid representation to using shaders for rendering the mesh was impossible. The entire format is designed around CPU-based rendering. Video hardware accelaration is not possible for about 95% of the spec.

Nothing has changed at Intel since we were dealing with them for the last 2 years on it. Effectively this project is 2 engineers and one manager trying to save their arse and the code from failed Shockwave efforts.

An example - the press release says it will be an ISO standard. The ISO people have no idea what Intel is talking about as they've not been approached yet. It would fall under either SC24 or SC29 subcommittes (SC24 3D graphics, SC29 is programming and home to MPEG) and both of these committees already have standards that fullfil these requirements (MPEG and VRML/X3D). It wouldn't make it past the front gate at ISO.

Re:Really bad examples to pick...

[PalmerEldritch42]

The article says that 3 big companies in on this are Intel, Adobe, and Microsoft (and a variety of other unnamed parties). I would much prefer to see some companies that do more with 3D content createion, like Autodesk, Discreet, Alias/Wavefront, Invidia, etc. Might it not be best to ask the big players first?