collada scene and transformations ?

Hi,
I need to import a 3dsmax (or made by other 3D modeling ) scene using collada. I need to visualise the scene in a timeline, where the user can do customs animations. But I am in big trouble to find a good way to represent the scene in a timeline. The problem is the collada specification says that each node can have a infinite transformation list (rotation,scale,skew,position), in my software I need to represent the transformation by one scale and one rotation and one position. How can I transform an infinite transformation list in a simple standard transformation list like in a standard 3D software ? Do I need to export with a baked matrix ? but how can I extract a simple scale,rotation,position transformation ?

Best regards

The 3x3 matrix in the left upper corner of the 4x4 matrix is the product of the scale/shear with the rotation matrix. The bottom row should be [0 0 0 1]. The last column is your translation.

You will need to decompose the 3x3 matrix in rotation and scale if its determinant is not 1. There are several ways of doing this (google is your friend).

thanks for your answer … I was a litlle bit lost with this problem. Is there a prefered method to do that and have a friendly decomposition for user (to have component like in a DCC tools ?) …

regards,