What file format for building models?

I want to display buldings in my model. What file format would be best .3ds .md2…?

If you want to make your own loader and are quite familiar with binary files I would suggest .3ds. I believe this is the most common file type. If you are looking for a more simple file format just to begin, I would suggest maya’s obj format. Its simple and ascii and easy to understand. Md2 and md3 are mainly for characters I think. My opinion is that you go with 3ds because there are a lot of cool things you can do with them like animation and such.

Try Anim8or . It’s free, very capable and exports to 3DS format which is readable by almost everything, including a lot of user-written mesh loading code.