Just looking at the current OBJ exporter. It doesn’t seem that there is a way to create obj groups from collections in Blender at the moment? That would be a good feature to have
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Let’s get the original targets finished, before even considering piling more features on top of Hugo 
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That would be great, also drag and drop of (multiple) files into the 3d viewport would be amazing!
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Unfortunately I have to announce this project will now be dead as my mentors have failed me in this gsoc evaluation. I understand their decision and hope to be able to work with them again. I think I might still be able to finish the project after the summer ends, but from their feedback it seems it wouldn’t be accepted as is
Sheesh, that’s too bad.
sad story I hope you will come back again!
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Can you share what their concerns were on the technical side of things?
To paraphrase:
- “we feel that a major rewrite would be necessary”
- ‘massive’ use of Boost (I disagree with this point, it’s only used in the importer and it’s use in the parser was experimental)
- the use of C++ iterators over Blender’s data structures
- the lack of an object oriented structure for the exporter
These two last points were, in my opinion, clearly stated in my proposal and visible in my initial patch.
That’s a shame, sorry to hear that.
This was the project I was looking most forward to (and I think many others as well) as currently the import/export times are a show stopper for many production scenarios.
Thank you for all your effort and best of luck with finishing the project!
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that’s too bad, its should be the first priority in todo list what our community need.
Whoa, can’t believe this precious project died. 
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Very sorry to hear of the red tape. Once I finish my current project I plan to attempt at least a fast .PLY import add-on, possibly .OBJ later on. 95% of everything I do in Blender requires importing huge .PLY files and just for my own peace of mind I’ll give it a shot.
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You might want to try out my Python module for this: https://github.com/paulmelis/blender-ply-import. It’s not a drop-in replacement for the built-in import menu item and requires you to build the module yourself. But as it’s based on the rply library it’s quite fast.
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Fantastic, Paul! Thank you. I’ll definitely give it a try. The only thing I like better than writing awesome tools is when someone has already done so 
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Disclaimer beforehand - I’m not a programmer at all 
I’m wondering if the importer(s) of Meshlab could be a starting point. It’s really fast and works with pretty much every .obj you throw at it. Or would that be unfeasible because of Blenders internal data structures? Its license is GPLv3, so that won’t be an issue I guess.
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I second that, I’m using it when everything else fails, has no issues with CT data, objs/stls with polycount in the hundreds of millions.
I must say that having fast import and export is critical to Blender’s success in competing with 3ds max. Hopefully our GSOC work could continue to be imrpoved. could it also become a plugin?
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It seems to be on the roadmap - https://developer.blender.org/T68936
Would be great to get something like drag and drop functionality as well, or at least a general file - import menu, without having to decide the file format in advance. Was browsing through some sketchfab models the other day and it was all over the place, dae, ply, stl, fbx, obj…
Nice, thanks for the heads up!
Reading sequences could be added as well for sims or 4D data (a’la houdini) but other than that I’m out of ideas.
Good to see an accessible and transparent roadmap like this.
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