Google Funds COLLADA Support for Mac and Linux
By Christian
LaForte, Feeling SoftwareCOLLADA, the standard
3D interchange format, makes it much easier to translate complex animated 3D models across
Google Earth,
Google Sketch-Up, Adobe Photoshop, Epic Games'
Unreal Engine 3, Autodesk Maya, and many other applications. COLLADA integrates 3D geometry,
textures, complex material, complex skeletal and facial animation, physical simulations, and
many more aspects. With such power comes complexity: integrating COLLADA from scratch in your
application is not for the faint-hearted. Luckily developers have created reusable libraries
to simplify this process, including
FCollada, which is
open-source, well tested, can import all versions of COLLADA and has been integrated into many
applications.
We've worked on development of FCollada over the past two
years, thanks to support from Google's Open Source Progams Office. Until recently, the library
was only offered for Windows; it is now available for Mac OS X and several Linux
distributions.
Google's sponsorship also enabled us to distribute and
support two additional tools for Linux and Mac OS X enthusiasts:
- ColladaMaya, a complete
COLLADA translator designed for Autodesk Maya. It's now available for all three major
platforms under the MIT license.
- Feeling Viewer, a
reference viewer for COLLADA content, supports all standard COLLADA features. A stand-alone
version of the viewer is available for free on Linux and Mac.