general workflow / provided material

Hello,

i’m from the dresden university of technology, germany and after the impressing presentation at EG2005 we are evaluating collada for our own use. After some short tests with the maya, 3dsmax plugins and the xsiviewer i realized that some features work but some not.

problems where:
7.0 maxexport -> xsiviewer: scaling (too big), no texture
6.5 mayaexport -> xsiviewer (lighting works with spotLight only)

for now i have some wishes and some ideas how our group can support/improve the collada community.

Wishes:

  • is it possible to provide the testResults.xls template together with all testscenes that are referenced by this ?
  • a better documentation of the common profile with a few more examples in the doc

What we want do do:

  • Collada abstraction layer (class framework) for c# and c++ for the common profile to give applications a simple read and write access to the scenegraph, geometry, animation and shading. On top of this we want to add a replaceable renderlayer for opengl and directx.
  • Furthermore we want to implement a common profile viewer (open source).

regards
Benjamin Neidhold
PhD Student
TU Dresden, Germany

Thanks for reporting the bugs. I’ll pass them along to the plug-in developers.

SCE posts the test results for the 3 major DCC plug-ins. For example HERE is one for Max. SCE is negotiating with the Khronos Group the IP issues for the test suite itself. Until that is worked out the test suite will not be released.

Can you post an example of how you would like to improve the common profile section? We are always looking for COLLADA partners to contribute to the specification documentation.

Both of these ideas would make great contributions to the COLLADA community!

Can you post an example of how you would like to improve the common profile section? We are always looking for COLLADA partners to contribute to the specification documentation.

during our first UML designtests for an c# class framework i had only some exampe collada files and my own maya and max scenes for finding out how a special node has to be serialized into a colladafile. i would be easier to understand what param/tag is allowed if each node in your documentation as one/more complete example for the COMMON profile that shows the maximum amount of data that can be store within this profile.

examples:

  • a list of all allowed params in the phong/lambert shader and a complete list of defaultvalues! (the list at the end of the doc is not enough) -> the camera node documentation is done well!

  • does the common profile support multiple passes ?

  • in my eyes the referencing system (internal XPointers ad external XPointers) is not describeb clearly. is it allowed to have a <input source=“…” >
    reference pointing to an source that is in a node far away in the same document and which referenzes in a collada file are allowed to be external urls?

  • is it allowed to have multiple instance-nodes under a node ?

-what inputs are allowed in a polygons-node (POSITION, NORMAL, …) and what subidentifier are allowed (POSITION.X, .Y .Z .W …).

I hope with this i can help you a little bit.

regards
Benjamin Neidhold
PhD Student
TU Dresden, Germany