COLLADA is a COLLAborative Design Activity for establishing an interchange file format for interactive 3D applications.

COLLADA defines a standard XML schema for data interchange.

Originally established by Sony Computer Entertainment as the official format for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable development, COLLADA continues to evolve through the efforts of the Khronos contributors. Dozens of commercial game studios and game engines have adopted the standard.

COLLADA version 1.4, released in January 2006, supports features such as character skinning and morph targets, rigid body dynamics and shader effects for multiple shading languages including the Cg programming language, GLSL and HLSL.

Solutions exist to transport data from one Digital Content Creation (DCC) tool to another. Supported DCCs include Maya (using ColladaMaya), 3D Studio Max (using ColladaMax), Softimage XSI and Blender. Game engines, such as Unreal engine and the C4 Engine, have also adopted this format.

Google Earth (release 4) has adopted COLLADA (1.4) as their native format for describing the objects populating the earth. Users can simply drag and drop a COLLADA (.dae) file on top of the virtual earth. Alternatively, Google sketchup can also be used to create .kmz files, a zip file containing a KML file, a COLLADA (.dae) file, and all the texture images.

Two open-source utility libraries are available to simplify the import and export of COLLADA documents: the COLLADA DOM and the FCollada library. The COLLADA DOM is generated at compile-time from the COLLADA schema. It provides a low-level interface that eliminates the need for hand-written parsing routines, but is limited to reading and writing only one version of COLLADA, making it difficult to upgrade as new versions are released. In contrast, Feeling Software's FCollada provides a higher-level interface and can import all versions of COLLADA. FCollada is used in ColladaMaya, ColladaMax and several commercial game engines.

See also

• X3D
• List of vector graphics markup languages

External links

• Official homepage
• Forum
• COLLADA book
• COLLADA tools including: ColladaMaya, ColladaMax, FCollada and the Feeling Viewer
• COLLADA DOM, COLLADA RT, and COLLADA FX libraries are on sourceforge
• Bullet Physics Library - First open source rigid body dynamics simulator with COLLADA Physics import

Computer file formats | CAD file formats | XML-based standards | 3D computer graphics | Graphics standards

Collaborative_Design_Activity | COLLADA