Novus Convert
Convert files
Vector & CAD format

OBJ converter

The .obj extension marks a Wavefront OBJ model, a plain-text 3D format that lists vertex positions, texture coordinates, normals, and the faces connecting them. It comes from the film-graphics world rather than engineering, which shows in its focus on appearance: materials and textures live in a companion .mtl file.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop OBJ files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where OBJ comes from

Wavefront Technologies devised OBJ in the late 1980s for its Advanced Visualizer animation suite, a fixture of early Hollywood computer graphics. The format long outlived the company — Wavefront merged into what eventually became part of Autodesk — because its transparent text syntax made it trivial for other tools to adopt.

How OBJ works

  • Line-oriented text: v for vertices, vt for texture coordinates, vn for normals, f for faces indexing into those lists.
  • Faces may be polygons of any size, and vertex data is shared through indices rather than duplicated per face.
  • Materials are external — an .mtl sidecar defines colors and texture maps, with image files riding alongside.
  • The specification also defines freeform NURBS curves and surfaces, though almost no modern importer supports that half.
  • No units are defined, and scale conventions differ between exporting applications.

When to use OBJ

  • Exchanging textured models between tools like Blender, Maya, and ZBrush
  • Game-asset pipelines and photogrammetry output
  • 3D printing when shared-vertex topology is preferable to STL
  • Museum and scanning archives that value a human-readable format

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Human-readable and easy to debug
  • Shared-vertex topology is cleaner and often smaller than STL
  • Near-universal import support across graphics and printing software
  • Carries UV coordinates for texturing

Limitations

  • Dependence on external .mtl and texture files means models routinely arrive gray and broken
  • No units, rigging, or animation support
  • Text encoding makes very large meshes slow to parse compared with binary formats

Compatibility

Practically all 3D software — modeling suites, game engines, slicers, and viewers — imports .obj, and both Windows 3D Viewer and macOS Quick Look preview it. Its weakness in transit is the multi-file dependency: zip the .obj, .mtl, and textures together or the materials will be lost.

None is defined; comment lines beginning with # are the only place to stash information, and no tool reads them systematically.

Convert OBJ to another format

Convert other formats to OBJ