David's Blog

The last day! The main thing I caught today was a COLLADA presentation. COLLADA is a industry standard file format that allows easy import/export of 3D data. As more companies support COLLADA files (.dae extension), the easier it is to add tools in your pipeline without concern for writing custom importers/exporters.

Remi Arnaud talked about the current state of COLLADA.

• 3 years old
• Made the industry standard file format by the Khronos Group in January 2006.
• 10-15% of game development uses COLLADA
• Interest from film industry growing
• COLLADA model repositories
  • Google 3D Warehouse
  • DAZ 3D Content
• Software that supports COLLADA:
  • Google Earth (3D Earth Viewer)
  • SketchUp (3D Content Creation)
  • Unreal Engine 3.0 (3D engine)
  • Side Effects Software's Houdini (3D Content Creation)
  • Autodesk's Maya (3D Content Creation)
  • Autodesk's 3D Studio Max (3D Content Creation)
  • Avid's SOFTIMAGE XSI (3D Content Creation)
  • DAZ (3D Content Provider)
  • Blender (3D Content Creation)
  • RealViz ImageModeler (3D Content Creation)
  • RealViz Stitcher (3D Content Creation)
  • RealViz VTour (3D Content Creation)
  • OpenSceneGraph (3D Engine)
  • Ageia PhysX (Physics Toolkit)
  • Nima PhysX plug-in for Maya (Physics Toolkit)
  • SpirOps AI (Artificial Intelligence Toolkit)
  • C4 Engine (3D Engine)
  • OGRE (3D Engine)
  • Agency9's AgentFX (3D Engine)
  • Irrlicht (3D Engine)
  • Omegame Menu Master (User Interface Toolkit)
  • Nvidia's FX Composer (Shader Creation)

COLLADA RT is a viewer that will display COLLADA content. COLLADA FX will load and display COLLADA FX files. Both are sample code meant to teach you how to work with COLLADA data. More information is here.

The COLLADA Refinery was briefly touched on. It is a tool that should allow you to massage COLLADA data into formats other non-COLLADA application understand. For example, you should be able to convert a COLLADA file to a list of triangles for a tri-stripper to read. The Refinery should be able to run in batch mode.

Dallas' DNA used COLLADA in the making of "The Ant Bully" via Houdini.

The first COLLADA book was introduced at this SIGGRAPH..."COLLADA: Sailing the Gulf of 3D Digital Content Creation."

And....cut! That's a wrap! SIGGRAPH 2006 is over! I'll post my pictures and videos this weekend. Next SIGGRAPH is in San Diego!

Posted on August 3, 2006 3:33 PM | Permalink| Comments (1)