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COLLADA Joins Khronos Group to Create 3D Authoring Open Standard(3Dlabs, Alias, +++)

Has sony FINALLY learned their lesson about making devs life easier? It would seem so.

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COLLADA Joins Khronos Group to Create 3D Authoring Open Standard; Project Initiated by Sony Computer Entertainment for PLAYSTATION(R)3 is now Open for Participation by all Khronos Members; Encourages Strong Tool Chain for all OpenGL ES Platforms

SIGGRAPH 2005

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 1, 2005--The Khronos(TM) Group is pleased to announce that the COLLADA(TM) project has elected to join Khronos to further their work as an open standard under Khronos' open participation process and royalty-free intellectual property (IP) framework. Initiated by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) COLLADA stands for "COLLAborative Design Activity" and 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. Numerous companies have supported and developed COLLADA including 3Dlabs, Alias, Aegia, Autodesk, ATI, Havok, NVIDIA and Softimage.

"COLLADA has already made great progress with strong industry support -- and now the time has come to formalize our standardization process by joining Khronos to ensure that any company can participate in its development and to ensure the standard will always be freely available," said Masa Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO at SCEI. "SCEI remains fully committed to COLLADA: it forms a key part of the PLAYSTATION3 tools strategy. SCEI has become a Khronos Promoter so that we can fully support COLLADA, OpenGL(R) ES and other Khronos standards."

COLLADA supports all the features that modern 3D interactive authoring applications need to exchange and fully preserve asset data and its feature set is expanding to incorporate technologies such as packaging programmable shader effects and controlling real-time physics engines. This new standard will enable 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 -- and will be developed in a dedicated Khronos working group that any Khronos member will be free to join.

"By designing authoring and acceleration standards in one organization, Khronos can ensure that COLLADA will enable powerful tool stacks for compelling 3D content across all OpenGL ES delivery platforms," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. "The availability of the same API across platforms from cell phones to high-performance consoles, combined with state-of-the-art authoring tools, makes OpenGL ES an attractive target for ISV development."

"Alias supports COLLADA joining Khronos and we will be integrating COLLADA into our FBX SDK architecture," said Michel Besner, vice president business development, emerging markets, Alias. "Alias and Khronos share the same vision of making 3D graphics capabilities available any time, any where and we look forward to helping to make that vision come true."

"Autodesk is thrilled that COLLADA is joining the Khronos Group," said Marc Petit, vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment, "We thank Sony Computer Entertainment for its leadership in creating a much needed 3D authoring data exchange solution. COLLADA brings definitive efficiencies to customers who implement pipelines featuring both 3ds max and games middleware solutions such as the Unreal Engine from Epic Games. We are looking forward to keep on working actively within the Khronos Group on the development of COLLADA."

"Softimage intends to join Khronos and continue to play a key role in the development and deployment of this important authoring standard," said Marc Stevens, director of research & development and product management at Softimage Co., a subsidiary of Avid Technology, Inc. "Since the beginning of the initiative, Softimage has been a strong supporter of COLLADA as a technology to enable our tools to develop content for a wide variety of platforms -- and so we welcome the broad participation and guaranteed long-term standards availability that Khronos brings to the 3D industry."
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Thanks!

I've always never been quite sure what Collada is all about, and I'm even more confused now with talk of physics engines etc. Before it sounded like an elaborate 3D file format or something ;)
 

Vince

Banned
gofreak said:
Before it sounded like an elaborate 3D file format or something ;)

It's just that AFAIK, a standardized XML schema for data exchange between DCC apps that exposes the intermediate format. Anyone can feel free to expand upon this... as I'm curious as well.

On FX and Physics which are due out in Sep/Oct with Collada 1.4.0, Robin Green (perhaps you remember him from SCE's R&D) is heading up the Collada FX group and stated the following:

Robin Green said:
The idea behind COLLADA FX is to provide cross-platform descriptions of fixed-function or programmable pipeline effects using single or multiple passes in a platform-agnostic manner. Say you wanted an reflective environment map effect that works on HLSL, Cg and GLSL versions of a model, COLLADA FX would be able to describe each shader (and multiple versions of each shader for, say, low and high LOD implementations) in the same document.
 
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