Vertex colour in OBJ files

The formal OBJ format specification does not include the opportunity to have per-vertex colour, only a per face colour through the MTL file standard. The usual approach of specifying vertex colour is to add the colour components, RGB as floating point values between 0 and 1, at the end of each vertex line. This does not break existing OBJ readers which are supposed to operate on a line by line basis and vertex colours defined in this way are widely supported. If a vertex line contains 3 values then they are interpretted as (x,y,z), if there are 4 values then they correspond to (x,y,z,w), if there are 6 values then they correspond to (x,y,z,r,g,b). So, for example a red vertex might be:

   v 0.5 0.5 0.5 1.0 0.0 0.0

It is possible for software to define their own extensions to OBJ by preceding the line with the comment indicator "#". This ensures that existing OBJ parsing code can still read the file, although of course not taking into account the meaning of the extension. ZBrush, when exporting models with vertex colour does exactly this. They have named the extension tag "MRGB", for Mask, Red, Green, Blue. These tags normally appear after all the vertex lines and before the face lines. There should be exactly the same number of vertex colours as vertices. The MRGB comment lines looks like the following:

   #MRGB ffdfa79effe4aea5ffd5998fffe0a69dffe3aca1ffe2ab9 ...... and so on

There can be at most 64 vertex colours per line so there will be multiple lines depending on the number of vertices. The data on this line, starting from character 6, consist of 8 hexadecimal characters per vertex colour. The first 2 characters denote a mask followed by the red, green and blue in subsequent pairs. I ZBrush the first MRGB line is normally preceeded by the following statement

   # The following MRGB block contains ZBrush Vertex Color (Polypaint) and 
   masking output as 4 hexadecimal values per vertex. The vertex color format 
   is MMRRGGBB with up to 64 entries per MRGB line.

So for example, the first vertex corresponding to the MRGB line above has "ff" = 255 (1) for the mask value, "df" = 233 (0.874510) for the red component, "a7" = 167 (0.654902) for the green component and "9e" = 158 (0.619608) for the blue component.

It is of course unfortunate that Pixologic chose this method to implement vertex colour when a perfectly standard approach already existed. Granted the standard approach does not support a mask, but for that a specific mask comment tag could have been used and the vertex colour stored on the vertex lines. After all, most uses of OBJ files would benefit from the per vertex RGB value while a mask value is someone more uncommon. This would at least mean that other OBJ parsing code would be able to deal the vertex colour information without parsing for non-standard comment tags.
Doubly strange that software like ZBrush will read an OBJ with vertex colours in the more standard approach but then chooses to export to OBJ with their far less standard approach.

Fortunately it is easy to write something that takes the Pixologic non-standard MRGB extesion vertex colours and re-insert them as the more standard vertex colours.