Import

Import loads a .glb or .gltf model from disk, for example one you made in Blender or bought from an asset store, and turns it into a mesh that every node can work on. Delete a part you don’t need, bevel its edges, cut a hole with Boolean, or move it into place. Its materials and textures come along, and when you export it, the file comes back with its objects, names and hierarchy, with only what you changed rebuilt.

Inputs

None. This node creates new geometry.

Outputs

Mesh

The model as one mesh in world space: every part's faces with name and path attributes, a named selection per part, and the file's materials with their textures.

Parameters

Parameter	What it does	Default
`File`	The .glb or .gltf model to load: choose it, or drop it on the field. For a .gltf, pick or drop its .bin and texture files too, or the folder that holds them. In Chrome and Edge the node remembers the file: after a reload it reads the file again on its own while the browser still allows it (otherwise click Reconnect), and Reload picks up changes saved from another app.	None

Parts

Every object in the file that holds a mesh becomes a part of the imported mesh. Each part is a named selection, named after its object, so you can pick it out in any node’s Apply to: move only the wheels with Transform, or remove the cabin with Delete. Every face also carries two attributes you can see in the Attributes tab: name, the object’s name, and path, the names of the objects above it down to this one.

The model arrives in world space, the way it looks in the file, and its faces arrive as triangles, the way glTF stores them.

Materials and textures

Each material in the file becomes one of the mesh’s materials, with its colours, its roughness and metal values, and its textures, drawn the way the file describes them. Extra UV sets, vertex colours and custom vertex data come along too, and a texture keeps using the UV set it was made for.

An amber ! badge on the node lists anything the viewport can’t show exactly, such as a KTX2 texture or a texture on a UV set the model doesn’t have. That data still goes back out when you export.

Painting over its textures

Paint Fill and Paint Masked paint straight onto the model’s own textures, at each picture’s own resolution, and Procedural Height Map adds its relief on top of the model’s normal map instead of replacing it. Only what a layer changes becomes new pixels: the rest of the picture keeps its exact bytes, a cutout keeps its transparency, and a texture no layer touched exports as the original file. A texture that uses a second UV set, or is moved by a texture transform, stays as it was, and the paint node’s amber ! badge says why.

What the viewport shows

When you choose a file, Import becomes the displayed node, so the model shows straight away. If the displayed node is already further down a chain that starts at this Import, the display stays there instead and that node cooks with the new file. That is how the AI mesh cleanup template shows the finished model as soon as you pick one.

While it loads

A large model takes a few seconds to load, and most of that time is not reading the file. Under the file name, the panel shows the step running now on one line, such as Cooking: Bake 8 / 10 · 12 s, and the cook activity pane at the top right of the viewport lists every node as it cooks. The steps a load goes through:

Reading file: the bytes coming off your disk, with how many megabytes are in.
Waiting for the current cook: only when another cook was already running. It finishes first.
Parsing model: Forge turns the file into a mesh. On a model made of several parts it counts them, parts 37 / 100, with a bar. It says Restored from cache instead when the project’s cache already holds this file.
then: Polyreduce 5 / 9: when the displayed node is further down the chain, each node below Import cooks in turn before anything reaches the viewport.
Computing tangents: only on a model with a normal map. Forge computes the frame the normal map is lit in, with a percentage and a bar. It takes under a second on a model with a million triangles.
Sending to viewport: the result is prepared for drawing.
Drawing 1.1M triangles: the viewport builds and uploads the mesh. The page can pause for a moment here; the progress animation keeps moving.

When everything is on screen, the panel shows one line, such as Imported in 6.9 s · 1.1M tris · 38 MB. Click it to see how long each step took. The node’s dot in the graph spins while it loads, or fills up when the step has a percentage, and hovering it names the current step.

If nothing in the viewport uses this Import, the file is read and cooked but not shown, and the panel says so with a Display it button.

Reloading the file

In Chrome and Edge, Import remembers the file you picked or dropped. After you reload the page, the model shows straight away from the project’s cache. If the browser still allows this site to read the file, Import reads it again on its own; otherwise click Reconnect once to give the browser permission to read it. Click Reload at any time to pick up changes you saved in another app, such as Blender. In Firefox and Safari, pick the file again after a reload.