Home > Supported File Formats > AVEVA to OBJ

How to convert AVEVA (PDMS,Marine,E3D) to OBJ (Wavefront .obj,.mtl)?

PolyTrans|CAD+DCC performs mathematically precise CAD, DCC/Animation, GIS and BIM 3D file conversions into all key downstream 3D packages and file formats. Okino software is used and trusted throughout the world by many tens of thousands of 3D professionals in mission & production critical environments, backed by respectable personal support directly from our core development team.

AVEVA

AVEVA is the world's leading engineering IT software provider to the plant, power and marine industries.

Okino has a long direct and indirect relationship with AVEVA and its customers. One of Okino's core competencies & specialties is in the conversion of super-ultra-massive 3D models to downstream programs which simply cannot handle those models (such as 3ds Max, Cinema-4D, Maya, Unity, Unreal, etc.).

Connection from AVEVA PDMS, AVEVA Marine or AVEVA E3D to Okino software is best handled either via the DWF-3D file format or the ZGL file format. Please refer to either of these importers and their corresponding tutorial on 'How to Import from Ultra-Massive AVEVA PDMS & AVEVA Marine Models'.

As another secondary method of converting AVEVA PDMS .rvm, PDMS DGN and Intergraph PDS/DGN/DRI files, you can load those file types into Autodesk Navisworks, convert to DWF-3D files, and import into Okino software via our DWF-3D importer. This works very well and is a highly optimized + highly refined Okino conversion pipeline.

OBJ

Wavefront OBJ is a little understood but highly used and prevalent 3D "polygonal mesh" file format used throughout the 3D graphics world. Okino, Alias Research and McNeel made it popular in the early to mid 1990s as a general purpose, simple-to-read, storage and transmission 3D file format, especially for the then-new companies who began to sell 3D mesh models via the Internet.

Relatively speaking, OBJ is a rather simple file format but a bit better than STL although similar to the more modern 3MF format.The OBJ format allows for 1 or more unique polygonal mesh objects to be defined, each with optional UV texture coordinates and vertex colors. Material definitions can be linked to the mesh geometry as defined in the separate 'MTL' file. The material definitions are rather simple (ie. no PBR material support) but acceptable, and with varied levels of texture mapping support. OBJ format does not provide support for object hierarchy, local transformations, meta data, lights, cameras, skinning or animation. Most notably, OBJ does not allow for 'object instancing' and hence 1000 copies of a screw would be saved to OBJ as 1000 explicit copies, rather than 1000 references to one master object.

A short history: In the 1980s there was a program called Wavefront Visualizer which ran on UNIX and ran its early rendering pipeline as a series of tee'd command line 'applets'. The data flowed from one applet to another via various ASCII based files - OBJ for geometry, MTL for materials and other ASCII files for animation, skinning, deformation, etc.

Okino knows of the Wavefront OBJ file very well as it provides the one and only full implementation of the OBJ file format and with the ability to consume exceedingly large OBJ files quickly and efficiently. This includes the only known implementation of OBJ-centric 'NURBS geometry' (surfaces and curves) within the OBJ file format (which is little or not used) other than that from the McNeel Rhino-3D software.

Vist the AVEVA WEB Site

DWF import converter's overview

OBJ export converter's overview