Supported Model Formats

Panda3D contains an extensible plug-in system for loading model files. These plug-ins enable Panda3D to load models in a variety of formats, without requiring an explicit conversion step. This page lists the formats and plug-ins available for loading models into Panda3D.

BAM Format

The most powerful file format that Panda3D supports is BAM. This is a direct binary representation of the internal object structure of Panda3D. As such it supports almost all of the objects you can create in Panda3D, and any model can be converted to BAM without loss of information. You can also save any scene graph structure in Panda3D back to a BAM file using the write_bam_file() call.

But because BAM files are a reflection of the internal memory structure of Panda3D, it’s theoretically possible for a BAM file created using one version of Panda3D to no longer work in a future version of Panda3D. Therefore, if you choose to work directly with BAM files, you should make sure to always preserve the source assets and information about the pipeline so that you can reconvert the model as needed.

Because it is such an efficient format, it is very well-suited for shipping with a copy of a game for end-users. This allows the finished game to load models very quickly, and the plug-ins for loading models can be excluded. This format is very well-suited for shipping with a copy of a game for end-users, with the further advantage that the additional plug-ins do not need to be included with the installed game. The distribution tools therefore automatically convert files to the BAM format.

With a few exceptions, most tools and plug-ins do not directly export to the BAM format. To create a BAM file manually, you can use a tool like egg2bam, or you can simply load or create the model in Panda3D and use the write_bam_file() method.

Egg Format

The second-best-supported file format in Panda3D is the Egg format, a text-based format that is unique to Panda3D. There are many tools available to manipulate Egg files, and you can even open an Egg file in a text editor to see what it contains. See the Egg Files section for more detailed information about this format.

An Egg file can contain static geometry, but it can also contain information for animating the model, as well as information about the model’s material, ie. what color the material has, and how this color changes under the influence of lighting). However, unlike BAM, it cannot represent all of the things that are possible in Panda3D. For instance, light sources are not represented.

Panda3D provides various tools for converting models to the Egg format. Furthermore, there are exporter plug-ins for various modelling packages that are able to produce Egg files.

The plug-in for loading .egg files is provided with Panda3D out of the box. Panda3D also provides an API for manipulating Egg files programmatically. The EggData class is the main entry point of this API.

glTF Plug-In

An increasingly commonly used format for 3D assets is the glTF format. This is a standard format that is very widely supported by many modelling suites. There are also many models available on the internet in this format.

The best way to load these files is via the third-party panda3d-gltf plug-in. This plug-in is not included with Panda3D by default, but needs to be installed separately. The easiest way is to use the following pip command:

python -m pip install -U panda3d-gltf

If you do not install panda3d-gltf, Panda3D will load glTF files using the Assimp plug-in, which also supports glTF files. However, panda3d-gltf is significantly more mature and featureful than the Assimp loader, so it is strongly recommended that you use panda3d-gltf instead.

For more information on the glTF format and importing glTF files into Panda3D, see glTF Files.

Assimp Plug-In

Panda3D also provides a plug-in out of the box that integrates with the Assimp library. This third-party library supports a broad range of different formats, such as .obj, .stl and .dxf, allowing them to be loaded into Panda3D without an explicit conversion step.

The full list of supported formats is available on this page:

https://assimp-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about/introduction.html

The quality of support varies substantially from format to format, and it is preferred to use a more specific plug-in if one is available for that format. For example, Assimp includes support for .gltf files, but the panda3d-gltf plug-in (mentioned above) is considered to be higher-quality.

Please note that while skeletal animations are supported, morph targets (also known as shape keys) are not currently supported by the Assimp plug-in, even if they are supported by the underlying format.

Caution

Models loaded with the Assimp plug-in may appear rotated around the X axis, due to the fact that Assimp uses a Y-up coordinate system whereas Panda3D uses a Z-up coordinate system. A future version of Panda3D will correct this automatically, but for now, you will need to manually rotate your models:

model.setP(90)

The following Config.prc settings can be used to control the behavior of the Assimp loader. Note that you will need to clear the model cache after changing one of these variables for these changes to take effect.

Variable name	Default	Description
notify-level-assimp	warning	Sets the verbosity of debug messages (spam, debug, info, warning, error)
assimp-calc-tangent-space	false	Calculates tangent and binormal vectors, useful for normal mapping.
assimp-join-identical-vertices	true	Merges duplicate vertices. Set this to false if you want each vertex to only be in use on one triangle.
assimp-improve-cache-locality	true	Improves rendering performance of the loaded meshes by reordering triangles for better vertex cache locality. Set this to false if you need geometry to be loaded in the exact order that it was specified in the file, or to improve load performance.
assimp-remove-redundant-materials	true	Removes redundant/unreferenced materials from assets.
assimp-fix-infacing-normals	false	Determines which normal vectors are facing inward and inverts them so that they are facing outward.
assimp-optimize-meshes	true	Reduces the number of draw calls by unifying geometry with the same materials. Especially effective in conjunction with assimp-optimize-graph and assimp-remove-redundant-materials.
assimp-optimize-graph	false	Optimizes the scene geometry by flattening the scene hierarchy. This is very efficient (combined with assimp-optimize-meshes), but it may result the hierarchy to become lost, so it is disabled by default.
assimp-flip-winding-order	false	Set this true to flip the winding order of all loaded geometry.
assimp-gen-normals	false	Set this true to generate normals (if absent from file) on import.
assimp-smooth-normal-angle	0.0	Set this to anything other than 0.0 in degrees (so 180.0 is PI) to specify the maximum angle that may be between two face normals at the same vertex position that are smoothed together. Sometimes referred to as ‘crease angle’. Only has effect if assimp-gen-normals is set to true and the file does not contain normals. Note that you may need to clear the model-cache after changing this.
assimp-collapse-dummy-root-node	true	If set to true, collapses the root node that Assimp creates, if it appears to be a synthetic dummy root node and contains no meshes. This variable is true by default as of Panda3D 1.11.0.

Other Formats

Other file formats need to be converted first to a supported format. Panda3D provides various utilities that can be used to convert models to the Egg format.

For several formats for which Panda3D ships with a to-egg conversion tool, Panda3D can automatically do the step of converting the model to .egg on load. For example, Panda3D ships with a flt2egg converter, which can convert OpenFlight models to the Egg format. If you try to load a .flt file, Panda3D will implicitly invoke flt2egg behind the scenes. The plug-in responsible for this is called p3ptloader.

The formats supported by this plug-in are OpenFlight (.flt), LightWave (.lwo), AutoCAD (.dxf), VRML (.wrl), Direct X (.x), and Wavefront OBJ (.obj). However, note that some of these formats can be loaded by the Assimp loader, in which case this plug-in is only used if the Assimp plug-in is not available. Also note that the obj2egg converter is extremely limited and does not support materials or textures, so it is not recommended to load .obj files via this route.

Supported Feature Table

This table lists the most commonly used supported file formats and the features that are supported by these formats and their respective importers:

	.bam	.egg	.gltf	.obj	.dae	.x
Node hierarchy	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Custom object tags	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌	❌	❌
Geometry
Triangle meshes	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Higher-order polygons	❌	✔️	✔️	❌	✔️	✔️
Lines and segments	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌
Vertex colors	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Materials and Textures
Basic materials	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Basic textures	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Texture blending	✔️	✔️	❌	❌	❌	❌
Gloss maps	✔️	✔️	❌	❌	✔️	❌
Normal maps	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌	✔️	❌
Height/parallax maps	✔️	✔️	❌	✔️	❌	❌
Emission maps	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌
Roughness/metal maps	✔️	❌	✔️	✔️	❌	❌
Texcoord transforms	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌	❌	❌
Animation
Object animations	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌
Skeletal animations	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌	✔️	✔️
Morph targets	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌	❌	❌
Split animation files	✔️	✔️	❌	❌	❌	❌
Other
Collision shapes	✔️	✔️	❌	❌	❌	❌
Light sources	✔️	❌	✔️	❌	✔️	❌
Level of detail (LOD)	✔️	✔️	❌	❌	❌	❌
External references	❌	✔️	❌	❌	❌	❌
NURBS curves	❌	✔️	❌	❌	❌	❌
Shaders	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌