fbx/obj question

TheDude616616

I have seen people make comments in the past that a .obj and .fbx file receives a license stamp on every 3d package it has ever been exported in on a forum somewhere and I was wondering if it was true and how do you see that information. This is just something I think would be interesting to see a .fbx that says it went from max to modo to zbrush .etc. I think I first saw this on a thread somewhere that someone was trying to get around their student license for commercial work. Im just curious if its true because wouldn't that possibly increase the file size (even if it is a minuscule amount)?

and please for the love of God do not tell me to stop trying to break a license agreement. Im not. I own a commercial license of maya this is seriously just something I am wondering about.

sushi

I worked in the legal field for over four years and was educated and involved in advanced digital data recovery on a day-to-day basis. I have no doubt that such a thing as you mentioned exists - it is very possible and likely.

As for file size, metadata is extremely lightweight and has virtually no impact on file size.

DireWolf

Haven't seen those kind of info in any obj I worked with. Anyhow you can open obj in text editor and look for it yourself.

JedTheKrampus

Obj files are exported as plaintext, and you can optionally export fbx files as plaintext as well. If you really want to know what's inside them you can open them up and take a look with a text editor (or a hex editor for extra paranoia.) Or you could try exporting one obj from Maya's student version and Maya's full version and run sha256sum on them both and see if there's a difference. Checksums are probably the easiest way to check--if two files have the same checksum and it's not CRC32 they're practically guaranteed to be the same.

I know that Maya puts a stamp on its native format if you work with a student version. That's actually what turned me off of Maya back when I was a student--told it to autosave in the background every ten minutes and every ten minutes it would give me a popup saying "HAY UR A STUDENT." Thanks, Maya, and fuck you too. If you didn't crash so much I wouldn't need you to autosave, know what I'm sayin?

The student watermark is pretty simple to remove from a .ma file with a text editor, just like any other sort of .ma file corruption or problem, but I don't know how easy it is to turn a .ma from a student version into exactly the kind of .ma that a full version of Maya would spit out. This stuff is pretty simple to verify with any checksum utility though, so I would encourage you to experiment with it on your own with student/full/cracked versions for science if you find the topic interesting. I mostly use Blender these days though, so I'm not terribly interested in the result one way or the other.