.obj to vertex data

The above spinning blahaj was rendered in a browser with typescript, see at alternyxx.com/blahaj! The model can be found here.

Intended Usage

The program aims to make .obj files with triangle data, for example,

v 1 0 0
v 0 1 0
v 0 0 1

vn 0.577 0.577 0.577

f 1//1 2//2 3//3

to

1, 0, 0, 0.5777, 0.5777, 0.5777,
0, 1, 0, 0.5777, 0.5777, 0.5777,
0, 0, 1, 0.5777, 0.5777, 0.5777,

This is for parsing obj files to be suitable to feed to a vertex buffer. For most cases, it'd be better to just use an index buffer though. If your .obj file has faces with quads, which is usually the case, eg.

f 1/1/1 2/1/1 3/1/1 4/1/1

Then, you could change your vertex buffer accordingly to have 4 vertex coordinates in the case the graphics api you're using supports quads. Else, you can triangulate when exporting from blender or github.com/StefanJohnsen/TriangulateOBJ-App to triangulate quads in a .obj file which is what I did for the blahaj!

Installation

pip

Make sure Python and pip is installed. Python version needs to be >= 3.10. Then run

pip install vertexdata

Build

You can also simply clone the repository and build from scratch. This should be especially trivial as the project has 0 dependancies.

git clone https://github.com/alternyxx/vertexdata
cd vertexdata
pip install .

Command Line Usage

Once installed, you can run

vertexdata obj_file {target_file}

to get vertex data in the target_file. By default, the program will generate all given vertex data, positions, textures and normals if given. To override this, you can pass in

vertexdata obj_file {target_file} -n -t

to only generate the positions of the vertices. For more information, run

vertexdata --help

Library

If you want to parse the vertices in this way in a python project, you can

import vertexdata as vtd

def main():
    vertex_parser = vtd.VertexParser(
        source, target_file, read_file
    )
    vertex_parser.parse()
    your_vertices_data = vertexparser.output()

source can either be a file or a string that youve already read, which then, you would specify read_file as false.
There's also flags to not handle certain data

from vertexdata import VertexParser, NONORMALDATA, NOTEXTUREDATA

vertexparser = VertexParser(
    source, target_file, False, NONORMALDATA, NOTEXTUREDATA
)