Neutral File Format .nff
Ray-tracer test scenes. Primitives and polygons in plain text.
What an .nff file holds
NFF was Eric Haines’s neutral scene description for benchmarking ray tracers, a handful of plain-text commands for a viewpoint, lights, colours, spheres, cones and polygons. The same reader covers Sense8 WorldToolkit’s .enff variant. You meet it in rendering research and in the classic Standard Procedural Databases.
Also seen as .enff.
Commonly seen in: ray-tracing benchmarks, Sense8 WorldToolkit, rendering research.
| Data | Stored in NFF |
|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes |
| Materials and colour | Yes |
| Texture maps | No |
| Animation and rigs | No |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes |
| Read here | Yes |
| Written here | No |
Tested against a real file
The last sweep loaded spheres.nff from Assimp test models with its 2 sidecar files through the viewer on this site: 15,380 triangles across 4 meshes and 4 materials, in 2.6 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert NFF to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Other things to do with an .nff file
Questions about NFF
How do I open an .nff 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 NFF a good format to archive in?
NFF stores geometry, materials and colour, scene hierarchy. Anything outside that list will not be in the file at all, so archive the original alongside it if the surfacing or the rig matters.
Does converting NFF 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.
Formats that hold the same things
Or go back to the full format reference.