FBX
More info
- Creator
- Kaydara
- Owner
- Autodesk
- Type
- 3D file format
- License
- Proprietary
Autodesk's closed interchange format for 3D scenes – used by the entire games industry, owned by nobody but Autodesk.
FBX stands for Filmbox, a 1990s motion-capture application from the Canadian company Kaydara. The format came along when Kaydara passed to Alias and then to Autodesk in 2006. It carries meshes, materials, skeletal animation, morph targets and cameras, which made it the way out of Maya and 3ds Max and into game engines.
The specification has never been published. Anyone who wants to read FBX properly links Autodesk's SDK; everyone else lives on reverse engineering and hope. That is the main reason glTF has gained ground, even if FBX is still what an animator hands over without a second thought.