Is there any common 3D format libraries?

[sj04736]

First off, I should say that I am very impressed with the diverse range of model and image formats that Irrlicht ran read. The quality of the support for most of these formats is also very impressive.

However, Irrlicht is not the only 3D graphics engine that needs to be able to read these formats. Does anybody know of any open source projects that have taken on the task of producing a set of cross-platform libraries to read and write to the many 3D formats that exist? This seems to be common with 2D graphics formats (libpng, etc.).

If something like this existed (or exists), and it was done right (for as many people as possible), would it really be useful? Or would it just add another dependency and slow everything down? In my mind, it sounds like a good idea to have a library, that given any 3D model file, will spit out the file contents in a way that is usable in as many scenarios as possible, or the reverse. If anything, this would help the open source community to keep up with all of the evolving proprietary formats, without a mass duplication of effort.

So, do you konw of anything of this sort? Any other thoughts? Would this be a futile effort (no right way to do it, speed issues, etc.)?

[hybrid]

Yes, there are some libraries and tools which try to do this. Also some open-source tools. For us, those implementations are often not enough, though, as we need to have a read function abstraction layer for virtual file systems. The overhead of such solutions is usually not a problem, as you only load seldomly.