Open Asset Import Library (assimp)

Open Asset Import Library is a Open Source library designed to load various 3d file formats and convert them into a single, in-memory format. It supports more than 30 file formats for import and a growing selection of file formats for export. Additionally, assimp features various post processing tools to refine the imported data: normals and tangent space generation, triangulation, vertex cache locality optimization, removal of degenerate primitives and duplicate vertices, sorting by primitive type, merging of redundant materials and many more.

Its short name under which it is commonly known is assimp.

This is the development trunk of assimp containing the latest features and bugfixes. For productive use though, we recommend one of the stable releases available from assimp.sf.net or from *nix package repositories. According to [Travis-CI] (https://travis-ci.org/), the current build status of the trunk is

Supported file formats

The library provides importers for a lot of file formats, including:

• 3DS
• BLEND (Blender 3D)
• DAE/Collada
• FBX
• IFC-STEP
• ASE
• DXF
• HMP
• MD2
• MD3
• MD5
• MDC
• MDL
• NFF
• PLY
• STL
• X
• OBJ
• SMD
• LWO
• LXO
• LWS
• TER
• AC3D
• MS3D
• COB
• Q3BSP
• XGL
• CSM
• BVH
• B3D
• NDO
• Ogre XML
• Q3D

Additionally, the following formats are also supported, but not part of the core library as they depend on proprietary libraries.

• C4D (https://github.com/acgessler/assimp-cinema4d)

Exporters include:

• DAE (Collada)
• STL
• OBJ
• PLY

See the full list here.

Repository structure

Open Asset Import Library is implemented in C++ (but provides both a C and a C++ish interface). The directory structure is:

/bin		Folder for binaries, only used on Windows
/code		Source code
/contrib	Third-party libraries
/doc		Documentation (doxysource and pre-compiled docs)
/include	Public header C and C++ header files
/lib		Static library location for Windows
/obj		Object file location for Windows
/scripts 	Scripts used to generate the loading code for some formats
/port		Ports to other languages and scripts to maintain those.
/test		Unit- and regression tests, test suite of models
/tools		Tools (viewer, command line `assimp`)
/samples	A small number of samples to illustrate possible 
                    use cases for Assimp
/workspaces	Build enviroments for vc,xcode,... (deprecated,
		CMake has superseeded all legacy build options!)

Building

Take a look into the INSTALL file. Our build system is CMake, if you already used CMake before there is a good chance you know what to do.

Where to get help

For more information, visit our website. Or check out the ./doc- folder, which contains the official documentation in HTML format. (CHMs for Windows are included in some release packages and should be located right here in the root folder).

If the documentation doesn't solve your problems, try our forums at SF.net or ask on StackOverflow.

For development discussions, there is also a mailing list, assimp-discussions (subscribe here)

Contributing

Contributions to assimp are highly appreciated. The easiest way to get involved is to submit a pull request with your changes against the main repository's master branch.

License

Our license is based on the modified, 3-clause BSD-License, which is very liberal.

An informal summary is: do whatever you want, but include Assimp's license text with your product - and don't sue us if our code doesn't work. Note that, unlike LGPLed code, you may link statically to Assimp. For the legal details, see the LICENSE file.