FBX Viewer

An FBX carries its own scene graph, materials and often its textures, so a single file is usually enough.

1. 1

   Open the file

   Drop the .fbx on the panel above, or press Open 3D file(s). The version is read from the header before the loader runs, and the build number is shown with the format in Overview.

2. 2

   Check the scene

   Overview counts meshes, vertices and triangles and measures the bounding box. Materials lists names, types and texture slots; Issues names any texture that was referenced but not supplied.

3. 3

   Look at the animation and save

   Animations lists the takes the file contains with their durations. Export PNG saves the current view when a still is enough.

FBX exists in two containers and many versions. The version is read from the file header, not from the extension, and the build number appears with the format in Overview. Each container has a floor below which the file cannot be parsed at all:

At or above the floor the file is parsed. A file inside that range can still stop on a feature the loader does not implement, so the floor removes the impossible cases rather than promising that every newer file opens.

FBX can carry images inside the file or reference files beside it. Embedded media arrives with the model. External references need to be selected as well, and the loader keeps only the file name, so a reference to Textures/wood.png resolves when wood.png is among the selected files.

Missing names are listed in Issues. A model whose textures did not arrive shows a neutral surface, not a black one, and the material panel still lists the slots that were declared.

FBX is an exchange format between authoring tools, not a rendering standard. Materials are rebuilt by each application from the file's layers, and layered textures, procedural nodes and shader networks have no single interpretation outside the tool that made them. The viewer renders the base colour, the texture slots and the geometry the open-source loader exposes.

Units and up axis follow the same rule. The geometry is shown as stored and the size is reported in source units; a DCC tool may apply its own scale and axis on import, which is why the same asset can arrive at a different size elsewhere.

• Mesh count and triangle budget

  Overview counts what the file actually contains, which is the number an engine budget cares about.

• Materials and texture slots

  Materials lists the names and the slots that came through. A slot that is empty here will be empty after import.

• Clips and their lengths

  Animations lists the takes with durations, so a missing or duplicated clip is visible before it reaches a timeline.

• External files and version

  Issues names textures that were not supplied, and a refused version is reported before the file reaches the engine.

FBX is what DCC tools exchange; GLB is what a browser or engine can take in one file. For a static asset that only needs geometry, OBJ is the smallest of the three.

The GLB viewer for animation and PBR covers the delivery case, and the OBJ viewer for MTL and textures covers static geometry with a separate material library.