Model conversion

Supported model formats

While we hope to support more formats in the future, peekabot can currently only load models in its own binary format - pbmf.

The reason for using our homebrew custom binary format is performance. Parsing text formats is extremely slow in comparison. Furthermore, it allows us do some calculations offline during the conversion stage, rather than doing it every time the file is loaded.

At the moment, only PNG files are supported as texture.

Model conversion

peekabot ships with a conversion utility called obj2pbmf that converts models in Wavefront OBJ format to pbmf. OBJ is de facto standard and your favorite tool can most likely export it.

Performing the conversion is very simple - you can see how the conversion utility is invoked below:

$ obj2pbmf [--override-normals] [--texture <filename>] <input.obj> <output.pbmf>

Since the OBJ file format doesn't include support for specifying which texture file to use you must specify it explicitly with the --texture argument in case your model has a texture.