DeleD Community Edition

[JamesH]

[collada]

For more information about all the available tools/contributions, please visit collada.org.

Refinery is a tool, with a user interface written in Java for portability, that let you combine conditioners (C++ applets) into a processing pipeline. Once you have a working conditioning pipeline you can save it as a macro, and run it in a batch mode that you can include in your build process.

Khronos has announced a COLLADA contest. To participate in this contest (and maybe win a PS3 and a trip to SigGraph), you will have to write a conditioner for your specific development needs. For example, a conditioner to help with the integration with C4 engine ...

[Greg_Corson]

Hi, I work at Sony R&D and provide technical support for people writing COLLADA exporters.

Your exporter looks like it's working pretty good so far, but I would suggest you fix two items.

1. When you output filenames into your <image><init_from> tags, these need to be URI's not windows paths. At a minimum you need to convert backwards slashes to forward slashes and convert spaces (and other special characters) to the escaped version (ie: space=%20). So this example from an export I did:

C:\Documents and Settings\gcorson\Desktop\Delgine test\buildingpack1\Textures\Frauenkirche\system.bmp

Should actually look more like this:

file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/gcorson/Desktop/Delgine%20test buildingpack1/Textures/Frauenkirche/system.bmp

Some importers will still work if you give them a windows path with backslashes and spaces, but many will not, so it's best to get the URI correct if you can.

2. You probably want the option to output relative paths to textures. If you export absolute URIs and someone moves the folder containing the files to another place or another computer, the files will fail to load. The best way around this is to have paths to the texture that are relative to the location of the .dae file you are exporting. So if you assume the .dae file in the above example is in the "buildingpack1" directory the relative path would look like this:

./Textures/Frauenkirche/system.bmp

This is nice because if you keep your dae files and textures in the same folder hierarchy, you can move the entire hierarchy to another computer or another drive and you will still be able to load the files ok.

Hope this helps, feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions about COLLADA implementation.

[Paul-Jan]

Hi Greg,

Thanks a lot for the feedback, it is much appreciated! Our Collada Exporter is still rather "young" (in terms of development hours), we depend on user response to grow it into the right direction.

1. You are right, I'll get this fixed. I am not sure if it's perfectly legal to mix the file:// prefix with relative paths, but I'll figure it out [edit]OK, file:// should be omitted when using relative paths[/edit]

2. I find your report about relative v.s. absolute paths kind of puzzling, as far as I am aware the exporter already uses relative paths. For example, I just exported one of our models, and output the textures to a subfolder. Here is what the exporter wrote into the collada file:

[Paul-Jan]

We just released a new version of the plugin that addresses the forward slashes issue. It fixes a nasty bug in the triangulation routines as well.

I haven't been able to reproduce the absolute paths problem. If you have any more information on this issue, let me know!