In a perfect world, every content creation tool would be able to import and export in one common format that can easily be converted to the native data representation of a game engine. But because we do not live in such a perfect world, there are literally hundreds to thousands of file formats for storing 3D meshes. What makes things worse is the fact that there might be no import plugin for our engine or content creation tool available, forcing us into writing our own converter, which is very often the case with brand new tools and file formats.
This recipe aims to be an exercise in writing our own custom file format conversion utility. We will be working on an arbitrary set of vertex data, converting it to Panda3D's internal format, and saving the data into a file.