What is the deal with the OBJ and FBX file formats?

[raymond98P45]

After months of experience with different file formats, I would like to start threads in several forums about two interesting ones: OBJ and FBX. I believe they are getting a bad rap, are underutilized, misunderstood and it is our own fault.

For starters, having downloaded dozens of models I arrived to this erroneous conclusion:

OBJ and FBX are for clay, geometry only models.

Then I found a few colorful ones, so I revised my long held belief:

OBJ and FBX can carry colors but not Textures.

[To be continued]

-Ramon

[raymond98P45]

Probably most folks know that the *.mtl (material) files are text files. You may change their extension to filename.mtl.txt and see their innards with Notepad.

At this point it is pertinent to take a look at this post:

    This is how you find out what textures/maps are known by a file 

If you use a Windows 10 computer, you may double click on any *.fbx or *.obj file. Most of the time the built-in Windows 3D Viewer will display the object and allow the typical manipulations.

-Ramon

[raymond98P45 · Accepted solution]

A partial answer may be found here:

How come my object won’t export its texture maps? 

-Ramon
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