The Wavefront format was originally developed for the "Advanced Visualizer" software. It is used for describing objects in a realistic form for film and video.

It is particularly popular with 3D animation software. Wavefront contains information on 3D geometry, material, light and movement.

The files can be in both ASCII format and binary form. You can recognize ASCII format files by their extension ".obj". Binary files have the extension ".mod".

The Wavefront format always contains 3D data.