OBJ Format Question

MrRstar

I'm working at a place that is using GIT hub to transfer files between the art team and our programmer. Sometimes our objs are too big for git to want to deal with. I'm told by the programer that the problem is that Maya exports obj's as an ascii. We exported something through meshlab to obj and apparently those are binary objs and are much smaller. I've done some searches through google and in any settings in maya that i can think of, I don't see anything that will switch between ascii or binary.

Can someone here clarify what's going on and how I fix it?

JedTheKrampus

I'm pretty sure that obj's are always ascii. If you want a binary format for your stuff you have to use something more advanced like Collada, Granny or FBX. Either way, it's a pain in the butt to deal with art content with Git. Git was meant for Linux kernel development and works efficiently on source code but doesn't handle binary objects and art content in general well. There are a few different ways to deal with the problems. You can use a git plugin like git annex to manage your content. Or, you can migrate to a VCS that handles binary content better like Subversion or Perforce. It's also possible to have two separate repositories, one for source code that uses git, and another for content that uses a specialized VCS for content like Boar, or, indeed, Subversion or Perforce. Of course if you have more repositories it does make it take more steps to update a project from the VCS which is a good reason to use Perforce or SVN.