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3D.MBA

Pipeline & formats

Format conversion planner

What survives a hop, what degrades, and what a chain quietly destroys.

Practical26 formats compared
Source
Target
STEP AP242 → glTF 2.0 Routine 63% carried
B-rep is tessellated to triangles. This is irreversible: the resulting mesh has no fillet radii, no design intent and no exact surfaces. Set the chord tolerance deliberately — it decides both the silhouette quality and the triangle count.

The single most common pipeline in industrial 3D. Tessellate, decimate, bake, compress. Budget a tolerance decision, not a button press.

Survives 5
  • Triangle mesh The tessellated surface itself.
  • Assembly hierarchy Parts, sub-assemblies and their placement matrices.
  • Names & part IDs The identifiers that let a BOM line map to geometry.
  • Units & scale Whether one unit means one metre, one centimetre or nothing at all.
  • Semantic metadata Properties, classifications, IFC psets, custom attributes.
Degraded 0

Nothing.

Lost 3
  • Exact B-rep solids Analytic surfaces, fillets and blends as equations rather than triangles.
  • NURBS curves Trim curves, sketches and construction geometry.
  • Legacy materials Phong/Blinn colour and specular — convertible, but not equivalent.

Derived from each format's declared capabilities, not from testing a specific exporter. A given tool may do better, and many do considerably worse — "supported" in a vendor matrix often means only that the importer does not crash.

What this is

Pick a source and a target and see exactly which properties survive — derived from each format's declared capabilities across 26 formats and 17 properties, rather than from a hand-written matrix.

The chain builder is the part worth your time. Damage accumulates: a property dropped at hop two is not available at hop three, so STEP → FBX → OBJ → glTF keeps a quarter of what STEP → glTF keeps. That is the pipeline most organisations actually run, one tool at a time, without anyone ever seeing the total.

Things worth trying

  • STEP → glTF: routine, and irreversibly tessellated
  • Build the chain STEP → FBX → OBJ → glTF and compare it to the direct hop
  • Try glTF → STEP and read why there is no such thing as reverse tessellation
  • Ask where a Gaussian splat can go, and get told honestly: nowhere

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