This may be painfully boring for a live show, but I’d like to know more about the best/most reliable file interchange formats are available to 3D world and C4D users specifically.
Trends and forecast in Technically-oriented Industrial Designer and Hollywood/broadcast-style designers.
I make money between these two worlds. I do a lot of sales/marketing work for high-tech and healthcare industries and tend either get RAW CAD files from engineers OR 3D models from Maya/3D Studio Max users.
TOPIC 1:
What are the best, most reliable interchange formats?
I have/use PolyTrans (http://www.okino.com/conv/conv.htm)—a great brute force file converter that runs on a PC…and seems to be able to import/export pretty much everything I throw at it except maybe the proprietary formats like a Maya or 3DMax native format.
TOPIC 2:
What are the advantages of the newer open 3D formats?
Do they preserve quad geometry, normals, vertex maps, PLA, and materials, scale/units, bone/joint rig, etc
I’ve got some experience with the conversions, but haven’t really concluded which format works best.
Usually once I get past the initial conversion, I’m focused on rebuilding/repainting the model in C4D…I don’t get paid to test the huge variety of differences in the 3D file exchange process…
Modern Interchange formats I know of:
FBX?
Collada?
Old standard formats
3DS?
OBJ?
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Any other interchange formats worth knowing?
STL
VRML
RIB
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Generally speaking, what are the pros/cons of each format?
Knowing what breaks, when it breaks and sometimes why it break would be good to document for the C4D community at large….At least for the type of stuff I have to deal with.
Some of this file-exchange workflow issue was presented at SIGGRAPH this year, but I didn’t really grasp it all….
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