COLLADA (for 'collaborative design activity') is an interchange

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

for interactive 3D applications. It is managed by the nonprofit technology consortium, the

Khronos Group The Khronos Group, Inc. is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of 170 organizations developing, publishing and maintaining royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality, augmented reality, parallel computat ...

, and has been adopted by

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

as a publicly available specification, ISO/PAS 17506. COLLADA defines an

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

XML schema An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constrai ...

for exchanging

digital asset A digital asset is anything that exists only in digital form and comes with a distinct usage right or distinct permission for use. Data that do not possess those rights are not considered assets. ''Digital assets'' include, but are not limited t ...

s among various graphics software applications that might otherwise store their assets in incompatible file formats. COLLADA documents that describe digital assets are XML files, usually identified with a .dae (digital asset exchange)

filename extension A filename extension, file name extension or file extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file (for example, .txt, .mp3, .exe) that indicates a characteristic of the file contents or its intended use. A filename extension is typically d ...

History

Originally created at

Sony Computer Entertainment Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (SIE) is an American video game and digital entertainment company that is a major subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Sony, Sony Group Corporation. It primarily operates the PlayStation brand of video game co ...

by Rémi Arnaud and Mark C. Barnes, it has since become the property of the

, a member-funded industry consortium, which now shares the copyright with Sony. The COLLADA schema and specification are freely available from the Khronos Group. The COLLADA DOM uses th
SCEA Shared Source License 1.0
Several graphics companies collaborated with

Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

from COLLADA's beginnings to create a tool that would be useful to the widest possible audience, and COLLADA continues to evolve through the efforts of Khronos contributors. Early collaborators included

Alias Systems Corporation Alias Systems Corporation (formerly Alias Research, Alias, Wavefront), headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was a software company that produced high-end 3D computer graphics, 3D graphics software. Alias was eventually bought by Autodesk. ...

, Criterion Software, Autodesk, Inc., and

Avid Technology Avid Technology, Inc. is a global technology company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, and was founded in August 1987 by Bill Warner. It develops software, SaaS, and hardware products used in media and entertainment. History Avid wa ...

. Dozens of commercial game studios and game engines have adopted the standard. In March 2011, Khronos released the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite (CTS). The suite allows applications that import and export COLLADA to test against a large suite of examples, ensuring that they conform properly to the specification. In July 2012, the CTS software was released on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

, allowing for community contributions. ISO/PAS 17506:2012 ''Industrial automation systems and integration -- COLLADA digital asset schema specification for 3D visualization of industrial data'' was published in July 2012.

Software tools

COLLADA was originally intended as an intermediate format for transporting data from one digital content creation (DCC) tool to another application. Applications exist to support the usage of several DCCs, including:

Game engines

Originally intended as an interchange format, many game engines now support COLLADA, including:

Applications

Some games and 3D applications have started to support COLLADA:

Physics

As of version 1.4,

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

support was added to the COLLADA standard. The goal is to allow content creators to define various physical attributes in visual scenes. For example, one can define surface material properties such as friction. Furthermore, content creators can define the physical attributes for the objects in the scene. This is done by defining the rigid bodies that should be linked to the visual representations. More features include support for ragdolls, collision volumes, physical constraints between physical objects, and global physical properties such as gravitation. Physics middleware products that support this standard include Bullet Physics Library, Open Dynamics Engine,

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a color encoding system for analog television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

and NVIDIA's

PhysX PhysX is an Open-source software, open-source Real-time computer graphics, realtime physics engine middleware Software development kit, SDK developed by Nvidia as part of the Nvidia GameWorks software suite. Initially, video games supporting Ph ...

. These products support by reading the abstract found in the COLLADA file and transferring it into a form that the middleware can support and represent in a physical simulation. This also enables different middleware and tools to exchange physics data in a standardized manner. The Physics Abstraction Layer provides support for COLLADA Physics to multiple physics engines that do not natively provide COLLADA support including JigLib, OpenTissue, Tokamak physics engine and True Axis.

also provides support for COLLADA to physics engines that also feature a native interface.

Versions

* 1.0: October 2004 * 1.2: February 2005 * 1.3: June 2005 * 1.4.0: January 2006; added features such as character skinning and morph targets, rigid body dynamics, support for OpenGL ES materials, and shader effects for multiple shading languages including the Cg programming language,

GLSL OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) is a high-level shading language with a syntax based on the C programming language. It was created by the OpenGL ARB (OpenGL Architecture Review Board) to give developers more direct control of the graphics pipe ...

, and

HLSL The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...

. First release through Khronos. * 1.4.1: July 2006; primarily a patch release. * 1.5.0: August 2008; added

kinematics In physics, kinematics studies the geometrical aspects of motion of physical objects independent of forces that set them in motion. Constrained motion such as linked machine parts are also described as kinematics. Kinematics is concerned with s ...

and

B-rep In solid modeling and computer-aided design, boundary representation (often abbreviated B-rep or BREP) is a method for representing a 3D shape by defining the limits of its volume. A Solid modeling, solid is represented as a collection of con ...

as well as some FX redesign and

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accelerate ...

support. Formalised as ISO/PAS 17506:2012.

Notes

: As of May 14th, 2024, a moderator of the Blender developer forum has announced that starting with Blender LTS 4.2, COLLADA support will be marked as Legacy, and will eventually be released from a future Blender release.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Collada 2004 software 3D graphics file formats 3D graphics software CAD file formats Graphics standards XML-based standards