Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
FBX
Also called .fbx, Filmbox, FBX file
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
A scene format carrying meshes, hierarchies, materials, cameras, lights, skinning, and animation — the industry's working interchange for two decades. It is proprietary, versioned, and only partly documented; two applications' exporters disagree on units, axes, and material mapping often enough that an FBX round-trip is a task, not a step.
In practice
Still what everyone actually sends between DCC and engine. glTF and USD are better specified; FBX is what the exporter you already have supports.
Not to be confused with
- glTFAn open delivery format for runtime 3D: meshes, PBR materials, skins, animation, and a scene graph, held in JSON with binary buffers laid out for direct GPU upload. Deliberately not an authoring format — no history, no NURBS, no editable construction — which is why it loads fast and round-trips badly.
- USDA scene description with a composition engine: layers referenced, overridden, and combined non-destructively, so lighting can override an asset without editing it and hundreds of shots can share one source. It describes scenes rather than storing them — which is what makes “just export a USD” a misunderstanding of the format.
- OBJA plain-text mesh format carrying vertices, faces of any size, UVs, normals, and material references in a sidecar .mtl file. No animation, no rig, no scene hierarchy, no unit convention. Ubiquitous because it is trivial to parse and everything reads it — not because it is good at anything.