Re:WebGL Tutorial: Rendering Wavefront 3D Models
by Wilya on Sunday December 11, 2016 @02:33PM
(#13152698)
Yeah, but you still have to parse the .obj. What the article is doing is .obj -> .json -> WebGL arrays. There isn't really any reason to put the .json intermediary in the middle. Especially since you will only treat it as a blackbox to pass around.
JSON is nice as a hand-editable text format. It isn't designed to be fast to parse, or to produce small files.
Re:WebGL Tutorial: Rendering Wavefront 3D Models
by microcolonel on Sunday December 11, 2016 @02:42PM
(#13152739)
Given that .OBJ is largely a text file which contains a vertex list and an element list. It seems like it would make more sense to store it as a binary in the format which is sent to the GL driver, especially given that WebGL requires typed array buffers anyhow. Just need the offset, extent, type, and number of axes of each buffer.
Re:WebGL Tutorial: Rendering Wavefront 3D Models
by hccampos on Sunday December 11, 2016 @03:05PM
(#13152865)
Enter gltf https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF
Re:WebGL Tutorial: Rendering Wavefront 3D Models
by microcolonel on Monday December 12, 2016 @12:43AM
(#13155866)
Sadly glTF is JSON, and not typed array buffers (as far as I can tell). I was going to mention it, but it seems like in terms of performance almost anything can be as good or better than glTF.
This is one of those weird cases where, despite obj being a simpler format on paper, it would likely be slower to parse due to having to hand-roll the parser in JavaScript and not use the browser's native built-in parser instead.