Feb 02, 2005
With the recent press releases about the ‘new’ Universal 3D File format (U3D) and its use in Adobe Acrobat + PDF, there has been little independent perspective of how it relates to all-things-past and all-things-new in the 3D graphics industry. This article describes some of the realities and where the industry needs to go.
Summary: U3D has its roots as a 3D gaming and Web streaming file format, so it provides native support only for triangular meshes (quads and n-sided polygons are lost), character deformations, materials, multi-texturing, limited animation channels, and so on. U3D has none of the well defined CAD extensions of X3D, nor can it handle n-sided meshes, NURBS curves, NURBS surfaces, independent animation channels or quaternion rotations, etc. Thus, X3D wins out in terms of it being an existing, technically-excellent and well-defined “universal” file format.
