Anyone using Collada with Max?

Eric Chadwick

We're looking at a possible quickie cellphone project, so I'm evaluating XML export formats. Collada sounds good on paper, but I'm not sure if it's mature enough for full-on development. if anyone's using Collada, I'd love to hear your experience with it so far.

We want to export pretty simple stuff from Max 9... static meshes, skinned meshes, bone animation, materials.

Feeling Software was Autodesk's partner for developing the 3ds Max exporter, and it looks like they got pretty far with it. But now they're tightening their belts, looking for more lucrative prospects, so ColladaMax has recently gone open-source and moved to SourceForge. They say they're still developing for customers. Curious how well that's going. Is anyone a paying customer?

What about 3d viewers for checking the exported files? Are people rolling their own? Found a couple of them, not very robust though.
http://www.pinecoast.com/collview.htm
http://ballistic3d.com/ballisticviewer.html

The ColladaEffects material plugin for Max doesn't seem to like any files I create with mental mill, I get errors everytime. ShaderFX is looking more solid, seems to work fairly well with the DirectX material, and the FX shader seems to export thru ColladaMax OK. Can't see my materials in the freebie viewers yet though.

Any insights would be great.

Sage

Well this isn't for collada but what you described reminds of a problem I ran into when exporting objects to Quake 3 and Ogre 3d. To get the textures to show up I had to name my materials with the path where the textures was going to be located for the project. Example if the texture was located in a folder called textures I would name the material textures/mytexture if I remember correctly. I think for ogre I didn't have to specify the extension but for quake 3 I did. If you have an xml file you can edit you might be able to get away with just specifying that information in a text editor.


This might do the the trick in your case.

Alex

Eric Chadwick

Thanks Alex. Yeah, that's one of the great things about Collada, it's editable XML. There are no paths in the Collada file, I think it's just a matter of figuring out what texture format the each viewer supports.


The Ballistic one distorts the mesh but shows the material fine, and the Pine Coast viewer renders the mesh fine but with no bitmaps.

But neither one supports animation as far as I can tell.

renderhjs

collada can be big,- because everything is stored as character including the tags that sorround elements.
Some Flash engines on the web like Papervision and Sandy use *.dae (collada extension) files alot.
If you are into Maxscript and have the time you could export the objects in any format. Not sure how the programmers in your team later on will store the data but filesize might be an issue on the cellphone.

Btw. I´ve heard that Blender is the only package that supports the face attributes for the physic attributes. Collada itself was introduced as the official PS3 format I assume some of their tools for the ps3 is built upon the format.

Eric Chadwick

Thanks renderhjs. We're using FX Composer right now to check our exports. Materials and morphs don't show up there, but it's enough for what we need. We're on a short time schedule, so no time to develop custom tools.