wavefront-obj-parser

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

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

License

MIT