Collada Sailing the Gulf of 3d Digital Content Creation

COLLADA, the digital entertainment industry's first standard interchange format for 3D graphics, defines an XML-based schema to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information - enabling multiple software packages to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains. It was developed in a cooperative effort between the industry's leading developers of applications, games, and platforms to streamline the interchange process. This book, written by the two driving forces behind COLLADA, is a complete guide to the COLLADA 1.4 specification. It provides content developers, application developers, and tool providers with a unique insight into the design of COLLADA that will help them to: exchange and fully preserve asset data; package programmable shader effects; control real-time physics engines; and build powerful content creation pipelines that can automatically condition and scale 3D geometry and texture assets for real-time playback on a wide diversity of platforms. COLLADA was designed in collaboration with the digital content creation (DCC) tool vendors and game developers and has been adopted as an official industry standard by the Khronos Group.