I had been working on low hanging fruits like writing tests, cleaning up exporter which will be merged first, and some patches here and there.
Last time I tried normals, I didn’t know what to do, and just commented out the function call
I have some deadlines till 19th and would work on normals that day.
Looks like new OBJ importer can’t open 20-30mln poly (quads) at all. Native python importer do this, just slow.
Is the project dead or is there no point in continuing because of the USD?
It’s in limbo from my side for the near future. Howard is helping it land.
USD has nothing to do with this.
I am working on it. Progress is slow because I can only do this in my spare time. But hope to have it merged for release 3.0 in July (it will likely be ready much earlier than that, and in master, but we are too close to the “no new features” day for the 2.93 release).
@ankitm @Howard_Trickey
I just want to say thank you so so so much for working on this!
This definitely improve modeling pipeline.
I am curious what things to be sure to test. I imagine at least somebody cares about using OBJ to transfer to and/or from the other major 3D apps: Maya, 3DS Max, Houdini, Cinema4D, Modo, ZBrush, Lightwave. (Which have I missed that you want to interchange OBJ with?)
And I guess various web repositories of models are in OBJ.
Any hints as to where to find test files exported from each of these apps would be appreciated.
casual effects has a reference library available of meshes in various sizes with a friendly license.
i really appreciate your great work! Is the schedule still that this improvement will be integrated in the 3.0 release? @Howard_Trickey
Yes, that’s my intention.
It works way better than the standard exporter 
Any idea why I can’t set the “export_materials” parameter to False without getting an error though?
Error : EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
Address : 0x00007FF662884480
Module : blender.exe
Thread : 0000100c
Sad to see that this is getting postponed to 3.1.
that are really sad news, where do you got this information from?
It was moved to 3.1 because I hadn’t made sufficient progress in thoroughly testing and fixing it. Now that bcon2 for 3.0 has been extended a week, there is a chance that I might get the exporter ready in time for the 3.0 cutoff; but not the importer, which I haven’t looked at at all yet.
where can I test the newest IO build?
I made a buildbot build of the current state of the branch, so you can download the thing labeled “Blender 3.0.0-soc-2020-io-performance” from Blender Builds - blender.org
Hi. I’m trying to import a heavy(4.4GB) .obj file exported from Cinema 4D. With blender 3.1.1 Alpha it can’t import, it crashes during import operation. I tried this branch build from buildbot and I’m facing the same problem. It starts the import operation but after some time it crashes. My system have 32GB of RAM an when blender eat 31GB of my RAM it crashes (even my Gnome section restarts…)
I tried a software called MeshLab and it imports the same file very fast without issues, the only problem is that it imports the whole scene a single object…
Is there a plan to deal with that memory issue? Sorry, I didn’t follow this development, not sure if it was mentioned before…
Yes, due to lack for of low-level import code, it will be quite hard to import this size of file. I would suggest you break down your scene into importing multiple files that are smaller in size. Your chance of successful import would be much higher.
As an alternative, could you export to glTF from Cinema4D? Seems it supports that, will be a much better format to import