I want to buy some 3D models online at places like Falling Pixel and TurboSquid to use in Blender projects… but which file format should I get? I’m very new to Blender and haven’t been able to find this info.
No-one knows? Maybe I should make it clear I’m using 2.49b, if that makes a difference.
Depends on what you want to import. The ancient art of “fo sefu do” would help you =)
The way of the forum search function… it is one of the questions answered regularily, I guess thats why no one answered yet.
However:
Just look into your 2.49 file>import and there is your answer.
For anything purely made of mesh and texturedata they are all fine.
Personally I prefere .obj or .3ds, for converted CAD data .stl, also collada .dae works fine.
If it involves complex shaders, rigs or skinning, 99% of the formats fail the remaining 1% are mostly commercial solutions.
Take a look at Spaceship Movie WIP in focused critique. He sells models on TurbSquid and has experience of importing Daz3d into Blender.
Daz3d and for that matter Poser uses wavefront .obj
The UV layout and materials usually are preserved, all you got to do is to load the texture map.
Thanks, guys, and apologies if this had been asked many times before. I have a problem searching and using this forum, most of the time the site is painfully slow for me, taking a good five minutes to load a page. At certain other times, like right now, it’s fine. So .obj or .3ds it is. From what’s been said though, it does look like I’ll have to re-rig the objects myself. I also wonder to what extent I might have to re-work the material - I guess I’ll find that out once I start buying.
There are plenty of good modelers around here, why don’t you ask in the forum, if someone want to furnish you a model?
Generally OBJ works well and preserves UV coordinates. I have had good luck with LWO also. 3DS does not preserve UV coordinates a lot of the time and I would use as a last resort, just to get the mesh data. Going the other way, exporting from Blender, I have found that VRML actually maintains material colors quite well (not textures).
Collada is always hit/miss, especially in 2.49. It has made some improvements in 2.5 though.