When making video games we need to understand the meaning of the saying "Content is King". No matter how technically advanced our engine may be, all the ingenuity put into building all these great features is worth nothing without high quality content. Players are impressed by beautiful levels and nicely animated actors, not by feature lists, which is why we are highly dependant on artists creating 3D models for our games.

Model and animation artists are working with extremely feature-rich programs to put together and form the vertices, polygons, and textures that define the shape the look of game worlds and their virtual inhabitants. These programs all have their own proprietary data formats for storing mesh and animation data in memory and on disk. This is a problem for us because we need to get all this content loaded into the Panda3D engine and therefore, into our games.

In this chapter, we will see how to solve this problem by using a data export plugin that directly writes model files in a format that can be loaded by Panda3D. We will also look into the API for creating model files ourselves, so we can write our own converter if necessary. Lastly, we will pack and process the model data in order to store it in more memory- and bandwidth-saving data formats.