COLLADA enables content creation pipelines

COLLADA supports all the features that modern 3D interactive authoring applications and DCC (digital content creation) tools need to exchange and fully preserve asset data and its feature set is expanding to incorporate technologies such as packaging programmable shader effects and controlling real-time physics engines. COLLADA enables powerful content creation pipelines that can automatically condition and scale 3D geometry and texture assets for real-time playback on a wide diversity of platforms.

• COLLADA transports 3D assets between applications
  Enables binding of diverse DCC and 3D processing tools into a production pipeline
• COLLADA is a XML database schema for 3D assets
  COLLADA is an intermediate format - not a delivery format and not a scene graph
• COLLADA can be lossless
  Retains all information - even multiple versions of the same asset
• COLLADA has comprehensive encoding of visual scenes
  Including shaders and physics
• COLLADA is an open, archive-grade format that retains meta information
  When your DCC tool upgrades, you keep your assets

What New in COLLADA 1.4?

Core Feature Enhancements

• Mesh geometry
• Skinning
• Morphing
• Animation
• Assets
• Data validation

COLLADA FX
COLLADA FX is the first cross-platform standard shader and effects definition written in XML. It targets high-end systems running OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) and Cg (HLSL coming), as well as resource-constrained systems (OpenGL ES 1.x profile). It provides:

• Next generation lighting, shading and texturing
• High level effects and shaders
• Support for all shader models (1.x, 2.0, 3.0) under CG and GLSL profiles.

COLLADA Physics

• Rigid Body Dynamics
• Rag Dolls
• Contraints
• Collision Volumes
• Enables data interchange between Ageia (PhysX), Havok, Bullet, ODE and other game physics middleware

COLLADA Refinery and coherency check

COLLADA Refinery and coherency check - please use this tool to check if your exported COLLADA documents are valid.

COLLADA DOM

The COLLADA DOM released as open source, is a comprehensive framework for the development of COLLADA applications and provides a C++ programming interface to load, query, and translate COLLADA instance data. The DOM loads COLLADA data into a runtime database consisting of structures that mirror those defined in the COLLADA schema. These runtime structures are auto-generated from the current schema, eliminating inconsistency and error. Developers can directly use the data structures loaded into the COLLADA runtime database within their application so they can easily add import and export capabilities for COLLADA v1.4+ or COLLADA v1.3.1 documents.

What Next for COLLADA?

• Adding support for OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders
• Full shader FX framework for OpenGL and OpenGL ES
• Richer asset types
• Asset Conditioning - scaling assets to platform capabilities
• Integration of audio and video assets
• Run-time and delivery formats