Exploring an example glTF file

The glTF format uses JSON to store data. JSON is a well-known format; readers and writers are available for all kinds of operating systems and programming languages. A second format type, binary glTF, contains the textual description and all referred data in a single file. The binary type avoids the overhead for the Base64 encoding of the file data and the management of several separate files for the model description, texture images, and other buffer data.

We will now walk through the basic glTF file using the official glTF tutorial. The link to this glTF file is available in the Additional resources section.

Understanding the scenes element

The first part of the file defines the scene, or scenes:

{
  "scene": 0,
  "scenes" : [
    {
      "nodes" : [ 0 ]
    }
  ],

The scene field contains the index of the...