Convert wavefront mesh files

A plain text file listing vertices, texture coordinates, normals and the faces that join them, plus material references.

Where it is good

• Readable — you can open it in a text editor and understand it
• Holds texture coordinates and material references
• Accepted by almost every mesh tool

Where it falls short

• Very slow to load on big models
• The format has no official standard, so tools disagree on details
• No animation, no scene graph, no skinning

You will find it on

3D software, renderers, academic datasets, older pipelines

The thing people miss

An OBJ of a moderately detailed object is usually several megabytes of text, because every triangle is written out longhand.

Where it goes next

Moving a model between older and newer 3D programs