I installed the latest version of Apple Motion (seriously, at $50/license for a first-rate piece of video-editing and compositing software that keeps getting free upgrades, it's a steal) and discovered they've added a bunch of real 3d functionality.
Anyway, the format they support is usdz, which I'd never heard of. Turns out it's a format developed by Pixar, which—wouldn't you know it—supports a whole bunch of functionality necessary for AR (hence Apple adopting it for Motion and ARKit).
You can convert glb files (which Cheetah 3d handles quite nicely these days) to usdz, but not vice versa. Right now that looks like the best path for most folks since glb has become quite widely supported in the last two years whereas usdz was only published in 2018.
(BTW anyone else annoyed that this forum's image upload limits seem to be firmly rooted in 2009? I wonder if the forum software at least supports automatically converting, for example, PNG files to JPEG.)
I found a thread on the babylonjs forums about adding usdz support and apparently one of the problems is that usdz has a much more powerful/complex shader model than glb, which suggests (a) there will be no lossless path from usdz back to glb etc. and (b) handling the files may be more complex than simply converting data formats.
Anyway, the format they support is usdz, which I'd never heard of. Turns out it's a format developed by Pixar, which—wouldn't you know it—supports a whole bunch of functionality necessary for AR (hence Apple adopting it for Motion and ARKit).
You can convert glb files (which Cheetah 3d handles quite nicely these days) to usdz, but not vice versa. Right now that looks like the best path for most folks since glb has become quite widely supported in the last two years whereas usdz was only published in 2018.
(BTW anyone else annoyed that this forum's image upload limits seem to be firmly rooted in 2009? I wonder if the forum software at least supports automatically converting, for example, PNG files to JPEG.)
I found a thread on the babylonjs forums about adding usdz support and apparently one of the problems is that usdz has a much more powerful/complex shader model than glb, which suggests (a) there will be no lossless path from usdz back to glb etc. and (b) handling the files may be more complex than simply converting data formats.