3D Formats - Capabilities Overview

When exporting 3D data for delivery or for further processing, it is important to be aware of the features that are supported by each of the available 3D formats. This may also have an impact on your 3D model optimization (for example, at which point tiled textures or secondary UV maps will be supported). The following table provides an overview:

Feature glTF USDZ OBJ FBX STL PLY
Draco Geometry Compression ✅ ❌2 ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌
KTX2 & Basis Universal Texture Supercompression ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌
Textures & UVs ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ ❌
   Texture Transforms ✅ ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
   2+ UV Sets ✅ (✔)3 ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
Transparent Materials ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ ❌
Basic Real-Time PBR Materials ✅ ✅ (✔)4 (✔)5 ❌ ❌
Rigid Animations ✅ ✅ ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
Skinned Animations ✅ ✅ ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
Embedded Texture Images ✅1 ✅ ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌

Comments

  1. glTF supports embedding of binary image data via binary glTF (.glb). But even in its text-based version (.gltf), it is possible if the (less efficient) based64 encoding is used for the images to be embedded.
  2. Draco support has been added to the "superset format", USD.
  3. Although a second UV set is supported by the format, it seems to be still unsupported in the standard ARKit viewer, making the feature currently unusable for the majority of applications in practice.
  4. There is no standard, but an inofficial nomenclature for some common PBR maps.
  5. Similar to OBJ, FBX does not define an official nomenclature or way to store PBR maps, although several inofficial and/or vendor-specific ways exist.