My experience with Collada

Hello again.

I posted a thread already talking about linestrips and thanks for the replies.
I’ve used converters, etc. with little success moving between them. The 3ds converter doesn’t work if it has texture or is complex (using meshlab and the pinecoast viewer and two others I found). The same is true with meshlab and blender (viewing in the others).
Finally, I’m just trying to upload a simple model with texture (and maybe add some linestrips as an experiment) and be able to view it and maybe convert it. So far I’ve had little success.
Anyone with this experience or any pointers would be appreciated.

I’ve had success implementing Collada support in our pipeline.

I’ve been more focused on exporting Collada models from modeling packages for use in our product. In general, I’ve had pretty good success with this. I’ve found that most of the exporters (Max, Maya, SketchUp, Blender, etc) work reasonably well, and I can use them to make models that load and render correctly in our app. It’s very important to try to read the <extra> data that these packages export, or else you’ll get weird results.

I’ve also found that Collada import in most of these packages is pretty limited. Collada’s a very flexible format and many of the importers don’t deal with this flexibility well. For example some packages only import <triangles> and ignore the other geometric primitives, or they only import basic material data, or they don’t import <extra> data at all, etc. It doesn’t surprise me that you’re having trouble going from application A to application B via Collada. Usually the problem is that application B’s Collada importer doesn’t work properly. In general it’s best to stick with basic data configurations (all <phong> materials on <triangles> geometry, for instance) to get acceptable results.

One of the best things about Collada IMO is that most of the tools are free and open source. So if you’re a programmer you might be able to figure out what the issue is and implement a fix. At the very least it’s always a good idea to submit bug reports to the responsible parties.