Specification brings order to 3D development

The new royalty-free Collada 1.4 specification has been ratified and released under the Khronos standardisation process.

The new royalty-free Collada 1.4 specification has been ratified and released under the Khronos standardisation process, and Emdigo, Feeling Software and Softimage have joined Khronos as new members to participate in further development of Collada and other technologies.

"The rapid evolution of Collada and the news that big players like Softimage have joined the Khronos Group, is positive proof that Khronos is a very effective new home for Collada", said Dr Jon Peddie, President of the California-based market research firm, Jon Peddie Research.

"Sony and all the others members of the Collada Work Group have demonstrated a clear commitment to evolving the specification and driving ecosystem of tools, conformance tests and sample implementations".

Collada 1.4 represents a significant advance in asset, shader and physics data format definitions enabling 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information.

Collada 1.4 has been developed by numerous companies including 3Dlabs, Alias, Ageia, Autodesk, ATI, Feeling Software, Nvidia and Softimage; and has been reviewed by over 60 game developers to ensure that it enables multiple software packages to be seamlessly combined into powerful game production pipelines.

The Collada 1.4 specification is available for adoption and royalty-free use by the industry from the Khronos Group website.

"Every day, thousands of game artists and developers use Collada-based tools to author and process their next-generation game assets".

"With the addition of shading effects and physics to Collada 1.4, we expect this adoption rate to significantly accelerate", said Christian Laforte, CEO, Feeling Software.

"Technologies such as Collada and OpenGL ES enable exciting new games, graphical applications and devices that are becoming an integral part of our everyday life".

"This resonates strongly with the Feeling Software spirit".

"This is why we are thrilled to join the Khronos Group and to further contribute to this next wave of 3D innovation".

"We are leveraging the strengths of XML and XML Schema to provide better content models for your game data in Collada 1.4", said Mark Barnes, Chairman of the Khronos Collada Working Group.

"Collada FX has a well defined structure that can be parsed and validated more easily then other effects formats that rely on scripts".

"By working with standard technologies, industry leading companies and open source developers alike, we are defining a standard format that expands the tool horizon for artists and developers, enabling these creative people to use the best tools available to create the amazing experiences of next generation games".

"This new version of Collada is accelerating industry adoption and there are already Collada 1.4 exporters for leading tools such as 3DStudio, Maya, Blender and Lightwave", said Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group, Chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and Vice President of Embedded Content at Nvidia.

"Tools such as Nvidia's FX Composer 2.0 and gaming engines ranging from the Unreal Engine and Agent FX; to open source software such as Blender and Ogre are incorporating support for Collada - making Collada not just a specification but a genuine force in the industry to encourage and enable the creation of great gaming content".

The Collada 1.4 data digital asset schema is the first cross-platform standard shader and effects definition written in XML and includes core features such as mesh geometry, skinning, morphing, animation and data validation.

This new version of the digital asset schema will enable content creation pipelines that can automatically condition and scale 3D geometry and texture assets for real-time playback on a wide diversity of platforms including handheld devices.

Collada FX, new in version 1.4, supports high-level and shader effects with next generation lighting, shading and texturing capabilities and supports DX shader models 1.x, 2.0 and 3.0 under the Cg and GLSL profiles.

Khronos and members of the Collada working group are developing open source example code for Collada and will release a Collada conformance test suite during 2006.

Collada 1.4 standardises three related data formats for flexible data exchange between state-of-the-art authoring applications to provide the creative power needed to forge today's leading gaming content.

The Collada 1.4 digital asset schema enables lossless 3D data exchange while fully preserving asset data, triples the number of supported data elements compared with Collada 1.3 and provides strongly typed definitions for improved validation of content data.

Collada FX is the industry's first cross-platform standard for defining visual effects that targets both high-end systems such as gaming consoles as well as embedded and handheld systems.

Effects may be authored to support many different profiles which may include the use of the OpenGL Shading Language, Nvidia's Cg shading language, or OpenGL ES 1.1 state setting and texture combiners.

Collada Physics is the industry's first open standard data definition for physics effects including rigid body dynamics, rag dolls, constraints and collision volumes enabling data interchange between Ageia (Novodex), Havok, Meqon, ODE and other game physics middleware.

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