Models for exercises

Plenty of free models can be found here: http://www.gfx-3d-model.com/

They will be in Maya, 3D Studio Max, and .OBJ mainly. From Maya or 3D Studio Max you can convert to FBX or COLLADA. Both file formats have SDK’s that will parse the files for you and allow you to get normals, vertices, UV coordinates, etc., on your own without having to parse anything.


L. Spiro

TurboSquid has plenty of free models of various complexity.

If you want to write your own loaders, try OBJ format first - it is text based and quite straightforward to parse.

3DS is also simple file format.

You can find descriptions of both file formats by googling.

Here are some popular high-poly test meshes.

As for loading the things, your choices as ever are to reinvent-the-wheel or embrace the middleware ;)

Plenty of free models can be found here: http://www.gfx-3d-model.com/

They will be in Maya, 3D Studio Max, and .OBJ mainly. From Maya or 3D Studio Max you can convert to FBX or COLLADA. Both file formats have SDK’s that will parse the files for you and allow you to get normals, vertices, UV coordinates, etc., on your own without having to parse anything.

Thanks a lot! Good models. That is what I've looked for.

As for loading the things, your choices as ever are to reinvent-the-wheel or embrace the middleware ;)

Big thanks for these links. They are really helpful.

The Sponza Atrium model is awesome to work with, and it's a nice piece of architecture that puts the viewer in a game-like setting as well. But because it's so cool, you end up seeing it in too many demos

Another option is to write a simple parser for the . blend format used by Blender. I did this so I could easily experiment with more data in my engine and it was surprisingly easy. I'm very glad I did it as it makes it simple to try my code on all sorts of models (for example, see the site Blend Swap for a large collection of openly licensed content).

The basic .blend format structure (I believe it's called "SDNA") actually doesn't require much code to parse. If you're only pulling in a few properties it's pretty basic. In fact, the format tends to favor an "opt-in" parser that can grab only the properties you want without it being much work to simply ignore the unrecognized attributes (i.e. new versions of Blender likely won't break your parser!). That also makes it easy to write a trivial parser (e.g. only parsers vertex position and normals) and then add in new attributes as you go (e.g. animation data).

As I said, I've found using Blender's native editor format to be very convenient. For one thing, Blender can import a ton of different formats, so it's easy to re-save other formats as .blend. Also, if you want to edit the model - you can just edit it directly - no need to import/export (in fact, you might even have your program check the timestamp on the file and reload the model on changes - thus letting you try out the model changes without even restarting your program). Of course, .blend files are large and not that efficient to load, so I wouldn't recommend it for production code; but it sounds like you're just looking for test models, like I was.


The simple .blend loader I wrote is available on GitHub here. It's not very polished , but it gets the job done on my system (I'm the only user at this point). I'd be glad to help you fork it / adapt it to your project. It'd probably be a good opportunity to make my own code a bit more robust and less of a it-works-so-leave-it-alone hack. (I also wrote a brief blog post about it when I first wrote it almost a year ago). Apologies that it's code of the quick and dirty variety, but it should be enough to get you started if you're interested!

Does any body know of any complete scenes which are available for use by the research community? As shown above there are various resources for individual models but a complete scene is more than that. Perhaps a complete level from a real game, but in an easily accessible format? Ideally this would include material, lights, etc.

I guess the modding community has produced plenty of free maps for various games so maybe it's possible to get those in a useful format?