3D mesh file formats

Formats that store a surface as a list of points in space and the polygons that join them, often with normals, colours or texture coordinates. They are simple, widely supported and easy to pass between programs.

Formats

.3DS

3D Studio mesh

The DOS 3D Studio format: nested binary chunks of meshes, materials and keyframes.

.DRC

Draco compressed mesh

Google’s compressed mesh and point cloud format, also used inside glTF.

.LWO

LightWave object

LightWave 3D’s object file: points, polygons and surfaces in IFF chunks.

.OBJ

Wavefront OBJ

A plain text mesh of vertices, normals and faces, read by almost every 3D program.

.OFF

Object File Format

Geomview’s plain text mesh: counts, vertex positions, then faces.

.PLY

Polygon File Format

Stanford’s mesh and point cloud format, with a header that declares every property.

.STL

ASCII STL

The text form of STL: each triangle a facet of three vertex lines.

.STL

Binary STL

The usual form of STL: a header, a count, then 50 bytes per triangle.

.X

DirectX model

Microsoft’s Direct3D model format: an xof header, then nested template objects.