Supported 3D formats
Verified Tridi support and limitations for glTF, FBX, OBJ, USD, Alembic, CAD, PLY, and experimental Gaussian previews.
Applies to Tridi 1.6.0 release. Release notes
Format support
| Format | Extensions | Verified import behavior | Important limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| glTF, GLB, VRM | .gltf .glb .vrm |
Triangle geometry, hierarchy, core PBR materials, PNG/JPEG/WebP textures, UV0/UV1, transform animation, skinning, position/normal/tangent morph targets, and retained supported VRM metadata. Authored MToon materials use Tridi's shared Toon presentation. | Draco and Meshopt geometry and KTX2/Basis textures require a supported fallback. Full source-specific MToon lighting, VRM expression execution, and spring physics are not implemented. |
| FBX | .fbx |
Polygon meshes, hierarchy, common materials and textures, linear transform or morph animation, bones, and four-influence skinning. | Complex exporter-specific features may not map to the viewer. Mesh-swap animation is unsupported. |
| COLLADA | .dae |
Polygon meshes, hierarchy, common materials and textures, linear transform or morph animation, bones, and four-influence skinning. | Source names and up axis depend on the COLLADA import settings. Complex effects may not match the source application. |
| Wavefront OBJ | .obj |
Static polygon geometry, hierarchy or groups, source topology, common MTL materials, and local texture dependencies. | No animation, skinning, or morph targets. |
| PLY | .ply |
Static polygon geometry and source topology. With Experimental Gaussian Splat enabled, compatible Gaussian PLY files can be previewed as splats. | Mesh PLY and Gaussian PLY use different paths. Gaussian preview is viewport-only: it is not saved in .tridi, exported, included in render images, or available for mesh picking. |
| STL | .stl |
Static ASCII or binary triangles, facet normals, and authored triangle edges. | No hierarchy, materials, textures, UVs, or animation. STL does not define units; configure the source unit before reopening. |
| 3MF | .3mf |
Supported static polygon-mesh packages, including external object-model component instances. | Dynamic scene data and some vendor-specific extensions are not supported. |
| PMX | .pmx |
Geometry, materials, bones, skinning, vertex morphs, and supported group morphs. | Bone, UV, material, flip, and impulse morphs are not implemented. External VMD motion is not loaded. |
| Alembic | .abc |
Ogawa PolyMesh hierarchy, transforms, normals, UVs, common surface materials and textures, FaceSet assignments, source topology, and nearest-sample playback. | HDF5 archives, SubD, curves, and points are not implemented. Renderer-specific shader semantics may not map. |
| USD family | .usd .usda .usdc .usdz |
Hierarchy, polygon meshes, transforms, normals, UVs, display color/opacity, supported UsdPreviewSurface networks, source topology, and supported transform, skeletal, blend-shape, or time-sampled animation. | USD support is partial. Instancing and PointInstancer are not implemented, and unsupported required scene or shader semantics can stop import. |
| STEP, IGES, BREP | .step .stp .iges .igs .brep |
Tessellated geometry, hierarchy, transforms, available names and colors, plus native CAD edge topology. | Viewing only: no feature history, parametric editing, textures, UVs, skinning, or animation. Tessellation quality affects render geometry. |
External files
Keep referenced buffers, material files, and textures in their expected relative locations. Network image URLs are not loaded by the glTF importer. Experimental Gaussian previews also recognize bundled .sog, streamed .ssog, and SSOG ZIP archives containing lod-meta.json. See GLB vs glTF when choosing between a single binary container and editable external dependencies.