Autodesk FBX .fbx
The animation and game-pipeline workhorse. Carries rigs and takes.
What an .fbx file holds
FBX is Autodesk’s interchange format and the default currency of game and VFX pipelines. It carries meshes, materials, texture references, cameras, lights, skeletons, skinning weights and multiple animation takes in one file, in either a binary or an ASCII flavour. That richness is also its weakness: FBX is a proprietary, versioned format, and two applications claiming FBX support will not necessarily agree on what a given file means.
Commonly seen in: Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, MotionBuilder.
| Data | Stored in FBX |
|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes |
| Materials and colour | Yes |
| Texture maps | Yes |
| Animation and rigs | Yes |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes |
| Read here | Yes |
| Written here | Yes |
Tested against a real file
The last sweep loaded spider.fbx from Assimp test models through the viewer on this site: 1,368 triangles across 19 meshes and 4 materials, in 1.9 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
What we put in an .fbx file we write
Binary FBX 7.4, with geometry, per-mesh materials and embedded textures. Animation is not written: rigs and clips are dropped even though the format carries them. The scene comes out flattened to one node per mesh, with transforms baked into the vertices.
Convert FBX to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Convert something else to FBX
Other things to do with an .fbx file
Questions about FBX
How do I open an .fbx file?
Drop it into the viewer on this site and it opens in the browser, with the scene tree, the materials and the mesh statistics. Nothing is uploaded. If you want it in another program instead, convert it to GLB, which almost everything reads.
Is FBX a good format to archive in?
FBX carries geometry, materials, textures and animation, so an archive copy keeps nearly everything. The usual caveat applies: a format is only as future-proof as the readers that exist for it, and .fbx is well served.
Does converting FBX lose quality?
Geometry is copied vertex for vertex, so the shape does not degrade. What gets lost is whatever the target format has no field for: convert to STL and the materials go, convert to OBJ and the animation goes. The comparison table on each converter page says exactly which.
Written up on the blog
Formats that hold the same things
Or go back to the full format reference.