I was thinking in a potential use for Collada, based on the troubles I’ve been having with my latest project when I needed to render lightmaps on some environments.
The idea would be this: you have a program where you input a Collada document describing a typical environment scene, the tool adds extra UV channels to all geommetries, generates texture lightmaps, and modifies the materials to fit the new lightmaps. When all the work is done, it export the lit environment, also as a Collada document.
Questions are:
was collada intended to be used this way?
to store the scene in memory and perform the lighning/radiosity operations, it is wise to do so with the Collada DOM itself, or it is mandatory to load the document in custom structures, do the work, and convert/export again as collada (probably loosing lots of custom porperties of the input document)
is there any plans for some API, in which you can load a Collada doc, then safely perform complex geometric/lightning operations, and then export again as collada?
any other ideas about this project case?