Historically, Roblox had two mesh import options, OBJ or FBX. Now there is a new option, glTF! In this beta release, Roblox is supporting 3D mesh models and PBR textures. Support for rigged models, skinning, and animations will come in a future update.

3D Tiles is used for sharing, visualizing, fusing, and interacting with massive heterogenous 3D geospatial content across desktop, web, mobile – and now metaverse – applications. Previously referred to as “3D Tiles Next,” Version 1.1 of the 3D Tiles Community Standard is designed for streaming high-resolution, semantically-rich 3D geospatial data to the metaverse. 3D Tiles 1.1 promotes several 3D Tiles 1.0 extensions to ‘core’ and introduces new glTF extensions for fine-grained metadata storage.

Built specifically for 3D content, gITF is lightweight and easy to process on any device or platform, including mobile phones and web browsers. The gITF textures can allow creators to take a JPEG-sized file and immediately unpack it into a native GPU solution, reducing both the memory required and data transmission times by 5 to 10 times. This can be crucial for delivering content to consumers as quickly as possible in the metaverse.

Ultra Engine plans to use glTF for their main 3D model file format, so that final game models can be easily loaded back into a modeling program for editing whenever needed. glTF supports a lot of useful features and is widely supported, but there are a few missing pieces of information Ultra Engine need to add into it. Fortunately, this JSON-based file format has a mechanism for extensions that adds new features and data to the format. In this blog, the custom extensions added for Ultra Engine are explained.

At The Polys - WebXR Awards, Patrick Cozzi received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on glTF and its use to enable an open and interoperable 3D ecosystem.

glTF is a 3D asset format developed by the Khronos Group that is widely adopted, including for use in 3D Commerce web and native applications. The 3D Commerce Working Group at Khronos brings together industry-leading e-commerce companies to remove the barriers to deploying 3D in e-commerce at industrial scale. Today, the Working Group has released the open source glTF Asset Auditor Tool for content creators throughout the 3D Commerce supply chain to use as part of their asset validation pipelines. By enabling rigorous asset QA to be consistently applied across companies, the amount of 3D model reworking can be greatly reduced while increasing compatibility and ease of use for downstream clients.

Although the glTF Asset Auditor has been initially created to address the needs of 3D Commerce, it works with any glTF file and can benefit any industry that needs to reliably deploy and use 3D assets at a pervasive scale. Read the blog to learn more.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Neil Trevett as they discuss Neil’s career, the evolution of computer graphics, and his role at NVIDIA, where his work focuses on helping developers make good use of GPUs. He also explains the benefits of standardization in industry and how open standards can enable innovation and interoperability. Neil also discusses how 3D is changing the landscape of e-commerce and online shopping and gives his perspective on the Metaverse and how it can leverage other disruptive technologies.

Gestaltor Automated has been released for companies that require automated processing for hundreds or even thousands of 3D assets in context of glTF. Gestaltor Automated allows for a seamless integration into 3D graphics production pipelines and offers the whole feature set of Gestaltor Desktop.

PlayCanvas announced that their PlayCanvas Editor is now supports glTF 2.0 import allowing users to import and use 3D models created in other applications such as Blender, SketchUp, and digital asses from Sketchfab, directly into the PlayCanvas Editor. Read their blog to learn more.

In this blog post, Julien Duroure gives an update on Blender’s glTF Importer/Exporter including support for a variety of glTF PBR material extensions, what’s new in Blender 3.3, and extension add-ons.

During New York Times R&D’s work developing 3D storytelling tools with the newsroom, they built plugins that fill the gap for Vite and Rollup. These plugins enable build tools to parse and optimize 3D scenes using the popular and web-friendly glTF file format (.gltf, .glb). Now, they’re excited to share that they’ve open sourced these plugins for anyone to use.

Interest in digital twins has picked up over the last year. Digital twin tools are growing in capability, performance and ease of use. They are also taking advantage of promising formats like USD and glTF to connect the dots among different tools and processes. Advances in techniques for combining models can also improve the accuracy and performance of hybrid digital twins. Generative AI techniques used for text and images may also help create 3D shapes and even digital twins. These kinds of advances will allow enterprises to mix and match modeling capabilities in new ways and for new tasks.

There is growing momentum behind the glTF file format for exchanging 3D models across different tools. The Khronos Group calls it the JPEG for the metaverse and digital twins. Expect gITF to pick up steam, particularly as creators look for an easy way of sharing interactive 3D models across tools.

With RapidCompact’s recent release of version 6, they’ve added impressive new features and several improvements for handling 3D models. Among the changes is support for the glTF iridescence extension. Read their blog for the complete list of changes with this new release.

The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is constantly assessing emerging requirements of the glTF ecosystem and asking how the group can make the most impactful progress. Over the past 18 months, one issue has consistently bubbled to the top of these discussions: interactivity.

The urgency of developing new interactivity and behaviors capabilities for glTF has been fueled in part by the evolution towards the open metaverse. It’s clear that glTF can and should have an important role to play in this ecosystem, but we have some important functionality gaps to close first. We’ve spent the past few months cooperatively refining proposals for how we might build interactivity into glTF 3D assets. This blog will outline our current approach and reasoning, as well as invite the community to weigh in.

Join the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group and the glTF community at our virtual meetups. During each session our expert presenters will share use cases, best practices, tooling updates, and live demos, plus answer your questions live.

glTF Virtual Meetup #1 on Tuesday, November 8, 2022

• Integrating glTF into Qt3D, Vulkan and Embedded Applications - Mike Krus, KDAB
• Overcoming the Challenges in e-Commerce Content Creation - Jatinder Kukreja, SuperDNA 3D Lab
• 3D in Fashion - Baking Non-standard Unity Materials into glTF - Julien Berta, Smartpixels
• Ask the Experts - Q&A session with our panel of speakers and glTF experts

glTF Virtual Meetup #2 on Tuesday, November 15, 2022

• Blender glTF I/O : Support for glTF PBR Material Extensions - Julien Duroure, Blender Foundation
• Creating a Bridge Between Unity and three.js - Felix Herbst, prefrontal cortex
• Ask the Experts - Q&A session with our panel of speakers and glTF experts

glTF Virtual Meetup #3 on Tuesday, December 6, 2022

• Getting CGI Content Ready for Real-time with glTF - Max Limper, DGG
• Staging glTF to the Metaverse - Norbert Nopper, UX3D
• Volumetric glTF - Tim Porter, Mod Tech Labs
• Ask the Experts - Q&A session with our panel of speakers and glTF experts

Visit our events page for more information and registration: https://www.khronos.org/events/