What is it ?
COLLaborative Design Activity is described on its web-site as
a royalty free, open standard for the interactive entertainment industry that defines an XML-based schema for 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information
and is supported by the non-profit organisation the Khronos Group.
http://www.khronos.org/collada/
Various presentations made at Siggraph 2006 are available from
http://www.khronos.org/developers/library/siggraph2006/COLLADA_Tech_Talk/
Read the full Collada Specification in the attached document
http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/collada_specification_141.pdf
A couple of items I noted
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
Some more detail
This enables authors to describe how to apply color to a visual scene. It is a flexible abstraction for describing material properties across many platforms and application programming interfaces (APIs).
The COLLADA FX Loader project is a sample that was developed to load a basic COLLADA FX document, and to make all of the calls to the Cg / CgGL runtime to create and initialize the materials and effects defined in COLLADA. It also provides an API to apply those effects through calls to set and reset the pass state of an effect. The framework is easily extensible to add implementation for any types or states that are needed and currently unsupported. The sources for the COLLADA FX loader build into a library called libcfx.a that must be linked into the application. The loader uses the COLLADA DOM when loading assets directly out of COLLADA, or the effects and materials can be converted into a binary format native to libcfx.
COLLADA Physics
- Rigid Body Dynamics
- Rag Dolls
- Contraints
- Collision Volumes
- Enables data interchange between Ageia (PhysX), Havok, Bullet, ODE and other game physics middleware
Google has recently added support for COLLADA to the Google Earth KML file format (which is used for importing models into Google Earth).
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