wavefront-obj-parser

An api and cli for parsing wavefront .obj files into JSON

View live demo

View demo source

To Install

$ npm install --save wavefront-obj-parser

Running the demo locally

# Changes to the `src` and `demo` directories will live reload in your browser
$ npm run demo

CLI

The CLI will output stringified JSON to stdout

# parse from stdin
cat my-3d-model.obj | obj2json > my-3d-model.json

# parse from file
obj2json my-3d-model.obj > my-3d-model.json

API

var parseWFObj = require('wavefront-obj-parser')
var wavefrontString = fs.readFileSync('./my-3d-model.obj').toString('utf8')
var parsedJSON = parseWFObj(wavefrontString)

parseWFObj(wavefrontString) -> object

wavefrontString

Required

Type: string

A wavefront .obj in string format

Returned Object

The returned JSON object has the following one dimensional array properties:

var returnedObject = {
  // Parsed from `vn` lines
  vertexNormals: [...],
  // Parsed from `vt` lines
  vertexUVs: [...],
  // Parsed from `v` lines
  vertexPositions: [...],
  // These come from the `f` face lines
  vertexNormalIndices: [...],
  vertexUVIndices: [...],
  vertexPositionIndices: [...]
}

If you plan to use normals or UVs you'll want to run the data through something like expand-vertex-data.

This unwraps your data from being indexed across multiple properties (vertices, normals, uvs) to only being indexed based on vertices. You can only have one ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER in WebGL so you can't make use of multiple indices.

TODO:

• Handle files with missing values (i.e. no textures and normals)
• If memory ever becomes an issue, allow line by line parsing by reading stream chunks and checking for \n

See Also

• collada-dae-parser
• image-to-heightmap

License

MIT