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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."
Not only did they pick two lossy formats to use as examples, both MP3 and JPEG are patent-encumbered formats. (The validity of the Forgent patent on a piece of JPEG is a bit of a still-contested issue... but I'll leave that to others to discuss.) If you want to write a program using either of those formats, you're going to have to pay the toll.
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.
Interesting that they would choose two lossy media formats as models for comparison.
Would one really notice slight noise in the coordinates of points of a mesh or in texel color values?
Frankly, I'm more worried about this from the article:
MP3 is not free. Will Intel or one of Intel's licensors pull a Unisys after this format has become popular? Apparently, the 3D Industry Forum's FAQ page doesn't even contain the word "patent".
...right here.
There's also a separate 3DIF site.
The Army reading list
will allow 3D data to be more easily incorporated into other apps, such as web browsers
I hope the Christmas Island people get their act together before this becomes widely used... the horror... the horror...
Trolling is a art,
3D maps?
3D wireframes?
3D solid objects?
3D interior spaces?
JPEG != MP3, and wishing will not make disparate needs and functionality the same.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Interesting that they would choose two lossy media formats as models for comparison
Yeah, they're probably working on a lossy 3D format. Duh.
The fact that MP3 and JPEG are lossy formats doesn't have anything to do with this, and no, it's not "interesting".
Martin
How was choosing lossy formats even mildly interesting? That comparison was only for the purpose of pointing out that well defined standards for some audio and images exist. I would think fighting between 3d-studio and every other 3d graphics program allows for little to no transfering. Think every 3d program writing it's own non published file format and then think about having 1 published standard that everyone uses. Things like word and excel as open standards would also be nice.
:(){
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.
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.
You have a point with MP3, but the author of BurnAllGIFs.org seems to think the JPEG patent wouldn't stand up in a court of law.
U3D will get a head start due to early release and saturate the market with crappy files while formats with better compression and quality are ignored by the public because "it's good enough"
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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...
The Cheese Stands Alone.
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.
I forget who said it, but I think this fits very well: "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."
"they hope that such a standard will allow 3D data to be more easily incorporated into other apps, such as web browsers, to make 3D imagery more widespread" Web browsers?!? I really hope not. I find the idea of a banner ad requiring a minimum of a GeForce 4 and pixel shader support offensive. "Shoot the 3D rendered monkey in each limb and win a prize!" *shudder*
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?
- Jax
"Interesting that they would choose two lossy media formats as models for comparison."
Well, this is probably a sign that the new 3d format will probably reduce 3d files to 2d or 2.5d. So you'll lose some of the third dimension when you save in it.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Actually i really hope that his works. .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.
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
and for the 3ds guy your modeling software sucks and is a POS.
Most likely has to do with the fact that .mp3 and .jpeg are ubiquitous more so than anything. If they said, for example, .FLAC, they would have confuzlled the hell out of a good chunk of people.
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.
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.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
... let it not be XML-based. If there is a God in heaven he will not let it be in XML!
Thanks,
--
Matt
Ooooor, it's interesting that they compared it to a few formats that have allowed real people with real-world storage capacity to enjoy/share media of different flavors.
"Dude, you should see this 3D monster I created! Just let me plug my iEverything into the accompanying 70 lb. iRenderFarm."
You know what?
The lack of multiple UV channels per vertex makes .3ds quite useless for any modern 3D work.
Not to long ago there was a push for Microsoft to adopt open file formats for their office suite. They naturally didn't follow through. Their reason is they have a virtual monopoly in office suites - despite very viable alternatives. If they adopted an open file format then that would, in their mind, strengthen the competitors and weaken customer lock-in.
Their motive for advocating an opne 3D graphic format is that they have no stake in the 3D imaging market. If an open format is adopted then that gives them a leg up on taking over the 3D image market.
The interesting thing is how Microsoft "embraced and extended" the SVG format - only to make their own incompatible format wvg. This is inspite of the fact that Microsoft was involved in the specification. I would suspect they will use the same strategy with U3D.
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
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.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
Basically VRML wasn't designed to scratch a real itch, just a theoretical one. It was just a neat idea that was designed by committee, with predictable results.
Burbank, CA - A consortium of one programmer is working to
define a new file format intended to seve as a universal
file format for all data. The new file format will be
named the 'Universal File Format', of UFF. According to
the consortium, he hopes to make the new format as
standard as MP3 has become for audio, and JPEG has
become for 2D images.
"The basic structure of my file format is a sequence of
8-bit numbers," says the consortium, "in which each
number can represent anything required by the users of
the file."
I suspect it'll be more like TIFF and MPEG-4.
TIFF had so many options that it was years before a common subset developed.
MPEG video is a maze of twisty little codecs all different.
JPEG is not *necessarily* lossy. The JPEG specification allows for both lossy and lossless compression.
In common parlance, however, JPEG refers to the *JPEG baseline algorithm* which is lossy (but allows you to define the amount of loss). Note that even though you can create images that are visually lossless, baseline JPEG can never produce truly (mathematically) lossless compression. (no, not even if you set quality=100)
If you want lossless JPEG compression, there's the standard called *lossless JPEG* (LJPEG) which doesn't provide a high degree of compression though. There's also *JPEG-LS* which is another JPEG standard which provides for lossless compression.
If that's not enough JPEG for you, there's the new standard called *JPEG 2000* which allows a host of features such as the ability to choose between lossy and lossless compression, progressive transmission etc.
So calling JPEG lossy is true only if you are referring to baseline JPEG.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
We all know what this is going to be: an XML definition like everything else these days.
Universal everything is a misnomer, because everything is in a constant state of evolution. What works today, will be passé in a year or two when DirectX n+1 is released with new gimmicks. Standards are good for fixed concepts, or at least ones that take a long time before having significant changes. 3D ain't one of them.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Perhaps the best approach is a pseudo file format with plug in codecs, like Microsoft uses for its video playback.
the .u3d file extension is already used for a proprietary format for a neat little app called uinwrap3d, which a lot of modders use to make skins for custom game models. prolly no big deal but i just thought that was mildly relavent
maybe not...
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
The major players in 3D modelling/content creation can't even agree on the precise interpretation of trimmed nurbs surfaces, much less on other more difficult areas like material properties and lighting for rendering. For materials no two renderers agree on what something simple like a chrome material means much less something more complicated like wood, leather or marble.
:-)
They want to define something universal that everyone making 3D software will use as a native data format -- the two main products at Alias (Studio Tools and Maya) don't even use the same file format (because they have different problem domains -- but at least they share the same interpretation of nurbs
In StudioTools, some of the textures and images in the scene can be the result of compositing a bunch of layers (like photoshop) -- are they going to embedd a photoshop like 2D format in their 3D format? Others are 16 bit/channel or float per channel -- Now add trimmed nurbs, hierarchical subdivision surfaces, construction history, particle systems, dynamics, kinematics, animation tracks, procedurally generated textures, fluids, the list goes on and on -- the number of node types for StudioTools and Maya alone would be in the thousands. I'm sure that CAD and Engineering software packages would add a couple thousand unique ones to that list.
The mind just boggles at the complexity of what they're attempting. I'm quite sure they have not the faintest idea of just how large a chunk of work they've bitten off.
When I was at IBM (10 years ago now), we used to call this sort of thing "boiling the ocean". ie. comsume enourmous resources and money for extended periods of time while producing no discernable and/or useful results.
Ian Ameline
Software Architect,
Alias.
(Not speaking for my employer.)
Ian Ameline