Plugins

F3D officially supports plugins for certain file formats. If you installed F3D using the binary release, you do not need to load these plugins manually when opening your file. F3D loads them automatically.

However, if you installed F3D using a package manager, the packager may bundle the plugins into different packages or list plugin dependencies as optional to reduce the number of dependencies of the main package.

To open a file that requires a plugin, first install all necessary dependencies. Then load the plugin with the --load-plugins=<path or name> command-line option.

Alternatively, you can add your plugin directly in the configuration file if it isn't there already. You can specify one or multiple plugins in a single comma-separated list, like in the example below:

[
  {
    "match": ".*(file_extension)",
    "options": {
      "load-plugins": "plugin1,plugin2"
    }
  }
]

Supported plugins

F3D supports loading plugins and contains the following plugins: native, alembic, assimp, draco, hdf, occt, pdal, usd, vdb, webifc.

See the format list for more details.

note

The native plugin is always loaded automatically. If you downloaded the binaries from the release page, you do not need to specify the plugins above manually. F3D loads them automatically.

Plugin availability per binary

Not every binary ships every plugin, so a file may open in one binary but not another. This table shows which plugins are available in each official binary. The native plugin is always present.

Plugin	Desktop	Python wheel	npm / WebAssembly	Android
native	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
alembic	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
assimp	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
draco	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
hdf	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
occt	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
pdal	Yes	No	No	No
usd	Yes	No	No	Yes (64-bits only)
vdb	Yes	No	No	Yes
webifc	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

F3D searches for plugins in this order:

1. Search the static plugins.
2. Use the load-plugins option when it is a full path.
3. Search the paths specified in the --plugins-path CLI option.
4. Search a directory relative to the F3D application: ../lib.
5. Rely on OS-specific paths (e.g. LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on macOS).

You can also try plugins maintained by the community. If you have created a plugin and would like it to be listed here, please submit a pull request.

• Abaqus: ODB support by @YangShen398 (repository)