glTF 3d asset format?

Any chance of something open source like this being supported.?
Import and export would be awesome! (Export terrain and meshes, scene snapshots etc).

Would love to see something better than the buggy fbx format supported.

http://gltf.gl/

Hi supagu,

I have put in a feature request for your suggestion. For reference, this JIRA is UE-16059. When I have any further information on its status, I will update here.

Thanks!

Hi, would be nice to have now that the format is out in v1.0!

That looks interesting thanks for sharing.

Cool came looking to see if this was being considered - it does appear that it could be a decent alt to FBX

glTF was considered as the first of two alternatives for FBX in Blender (because they would stop further development to FBX): [Bf-gamedev] The future of FBX and/or other formats in Blender

+1 for gLTF support

We are definitely watching this format. It doesn’t seem to have great support yet in the dcc tool world but it is something we are considering as it gets more mature.

@Matt thats pretty good news, it certainly appears to be gaining some momentum and on paper looks like it might be slightly better than FBX.

+1 to this. As mentioned in recent stream here, Blender has an experimental plugin and is making a big push on it.

What is the status of GLTF making its way into Unreal 4?

Cuz I would really like to see it in the engine :slight_smile:

Im interested in this sort of thing too, Im sick of being railroaded into binary formats with limited portability, Im not really interested in what the industry is currently using because they will protect current pipelines (no matter how shoddy) to save money.

Ive actually started writing a format in a similar vein to gltf (didnt know of its existence before I started) but I am using JSON in combination with FBX to improve 3dsmax->UE4 support well beyond what FBX or Epic currently offer (including what Ive read of Datasmith).

I should send a shout out to Tom Looman and Alan Noon for their great work on maxscripts that got me started on my path :cool:

Unity is adding it and Godot already support it looks like

Unity and Godot are not DCC tools. Unfortunately Max and Maya aren’t supporting glTF.

Regarding Unity - it doesn’t have an official glTF support. Only third-party plugin which performs run-time loading.

Since they both have python support any gltf python library would make supporting it as a third party far easier. Until UE4 supports python though (Epic have said they are interested in this) support is probably difficult to implement.

Blender already supports glTF. I was comparing UE4 to other game engines…

+1: If you love something, set it up for free formats :smiley:

The language itself doesn’t matter. I mean - having Python implementation for something-else won’t help implementing glTF support for Unreal engine. glTF parser code shouldn’t be very large, despite there’s no SDK for it (my glTF reader/writer takes 500-700 lines of C++ code). Don’t interpret me wrong - personally I’d love if UE4 have glTF import feature - I have my own tool (“umodel”) which works with ActorX format at the moment, and having saving to glTF format would be really nice, it would let me saving content directly to Unreal. The problem is that nobody supports glTF yet. Perhaps except a pair of third-party Unity implementations. Majority of game studios are using Max and Maya for years, and I doubt these DDC’s will have glTF support one day - Autodesk spent a lot of money promoting their fbx, they implemented very first version of fbx pipeline for Unreal (UE3). I’m working with several companies which has geometry export/import pipelines, and nobody happy with fbx. My company is trying to promote glTF as much as possible, I spent 3 recent months developing several tools working with glTF for “one mayor CAD software / company”. But glTF is still not an alternative unless it will be widely supported in major DDC tools.

Also I’d like to mention that writing glTF exporter for Max and Maya (those I familiar with - I took part coding a few commercial plugins for those) won’t be an easy task. It’s relatively easy to save scene hierarchy and meshes, but not materials. This is because glTF has very special packing for PBR data, and I think it is even impossible to use packed texture in Max/Maya material graphs. Just look at tutorials describing how to prepare materials for Unity (it has similar, but a little bit different texture packing). Most time of these tutorials spent showing how to use Photoshop for copy-pasting monochrome PBR textures into R/G/B channels of combined texture! It’s very easy to interpret glTF PBR material in Unreal because of its flexibility. Making such material in Unity requires shader coding. Making glTF-compatible PBR material in Max/Maya in not possible at all.

Ahh I was curious if you were that Gildor :slight_smile: So your glTF c++ code is for Unreal Engine? I can see where youre coming from and I did look over the glTF documentation as I was writing my own format and I chose against pursuing it because of materials support (as I want to work with substance) so thats interesting to know. Basically I wanted a more flexible system like substance has and Im using unique names to tie everything together, I do understand though that results will differ for a max/substance material imported in UE4 so I’ll be improving that pipeline as I go too.

The Python implementation was more about the 3dsmax end support but since you can bring in any dot.net dll its fairly powerful, you can invoke your own custom C# from maxscript for eg but since libraries exist in python (and it supports Maya too) its something Im looking into, especially with Substance Automation Tool. It just seems Python is becoming the go to language for DCC import/export pipelines. Personally Im going to be using a combination of C# and JS avoiding C++ almost entirely since Im writing the UE4 end with the LowEntry JSON for Blueprint.

Im really not happy with FBX though, Im a huge supporter of Autodesk having been using 3dsmax since R2.5 but I dont like proprietary formats as it locks me out of features I could be using by adding my own extended support. The problems with FBX are accentuated by UE4 and unfortunately Epic shafted themselves there and forced them into a position where Datasmith becomes a necessity not an optional bonus.

:slight_smile:

Unfortunately no. The CAD company we’re working for wants to see their models in VR, especially with Misrosoft’s HL hardware which is not supported by Unreal. So they choose Unity (I really don’t like this “engine”! and nobody from our team - who worked with Unreal - does).

I’ve coded C# glTF importer, fighting against Unity’s limitations in all relevant areas. We have a CAD exporter into glTF made by our other team members. Also we have an intermediate application in pipeline, which is supposed to optimize glTF file (polygon reduction etc) to be able to use CAD model with target hardware - I’m coding this tool now, using C++.

Unfortunately Datasmith is not an alternative either. It is just another closed format which is now supported by several CAD tools which were “outsiders” before Datasmith. And taking into account Epic’s presentation about DS, it still has material problems - the bike scene they exported from CAD into UE4 had “manual material adjustments” step to make it looking good.