Significant upgrades to OpenCOLLADA open source importer/exporter; New glTF project to streamline content delivery from COLLADA to OpenGL, OpenGL ES and WebGL
March 27th, 2013 – The Khronos™ Group today announces that COLLADA™ 1.5.0 has been published as an official ISO standard to provide a reliable, long-term international standard for 3D asset authoring and interchange. ISO SC4 TC184 has published ISO/PAS 17506 “… to enable developers to create tools to process COLLADA resources to import to or export from digital content creation (DCC) applications, 3D interactive applications and tool chains, prototyping tools and real-time visualization applications.” More information can be found online here.
In addition, the COLLADA working group announces that it has delivered on key objectives agreed with the COLLADA community over the last year. By working with NetAllied, the OpenCOLLADA open-source importer/exporter has been significantly upgraded to provide proven, robust operation and hosted on GitHub for free and easy adoption by tools vendors and the COLLADA community. The OpenCOLLADA SDK offers direct write and parsing import capabilities, and robust support for full COLLADA import/export, which is superior to many commercial solutions. OpenCOLLADA is available under the MIT license and Khronos encourages its free-of-charge integration in commercial and proprietary tools. OpenCOLLADA can be found here.
Further, today the COLLADA Working Group announces the formation of the new “glTF” project to define a final stage OpenGL Transmission Format to enable rapid delivery and loading of 3D content by OpenGL®, OpenGL ES or WebGL™ APIs. glTF™ together with COLLADA comprise a standards-based content pipeline for rich 3D web and mobile applications. Khronos will make drafts of the glTF file format publicly available during development to enable feedback and integration of requirements from the wider industry and will also create a sample open source COLLADA to glTF convertor. More information on glTF is available here.
Finally, Khronos announces that the full COLLADA Test Suite is now also ported to GitHub and is free to use to exhaustively test the quality of any COLLADA importer/exporter: details here with a full tutorial on how to use the test suite here.
“The 3D community should have reliable open standard formats to use when access to their assets is at stake. COLLADA has always provided the guarantee of continuity, which is now significantly enhanced with an ISO endorsement,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of Mobile Content at NVIDIA. “But the foundation for any asset format is reliability, and now with the upgraded OpenCOLLADA importer/exporter and the full COLLADA Test Suite freely available on GitHub everyone can have access to high-quality, cross-platform asset exchange.”
About glTF
Key requirements driving the development of glTF are: to match WebGL processing requirements, including using typed arrays within a browser; to use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to be cross-platform and web-friendly; and to hold geometry and texture assets in binary blobs for future expandability of asset types that may include streaming and compression. glTF is also intended to create market opportunities for run-time optimized 3D asset stores and repositories.
“glTF is highly complementary to COLLADA and puts another vital piece of the 3D ecosystem in place – enabling easy transmission of 3D assets from COLLADA for efficient processing in millions of OpenGL-enabled browsers, mobiles and desktops,” said Fabrice Robinet, COLLADA Working Group Chair. “By standardizing a run-time format, we open the opportunity of widespread, re-usable content to be efficiently processed at low power and high performance, with streaming and compression of 3D assets in the future.”
Come to the San Francisco COLLADA Meetup!
About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, WebCL™, OpenVX™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™, glTF™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.
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