hello! I want to start using collada in my aplications. I want to use COLLADA DOM, but I’ve never beore eorked with XML and I can’t find sample code for loading model anassests. Where can I find some cource code?
Hi, welcome to Collada!
XML is just a way of storing structured data. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet.
For the Collada DOM, you can have a look at the wiki, which contains the latest documentation. The DOM ships with some sample code in the “samples/exporter” folder, and there’s also Collada RT, which is an OpenGL Collada renderer that uses the DOM to load files from disk. RT can be found with the DOM on SourceForge.
The most important thing to understanding and using the DOM correctly is to understand Collada itself. The DOM is a very thin wrapper over the Collada data as it’s stored on disk, so if you understand Collada you should be ok. For more info on Collada, see the spec, the release notes, and the book.
Good luck, and post back if you need any help!
Steve
Thanks!
I’ve already compiled ColladaDOM. I have a soubt, the Collada FX package is not undled with DOM? I can see in the DOM documentaion some Cg classes, but there is another Collada FX package in SourceForge, how are they related?
The DOM, FX, and RT are all separate in the Subversion repository on SourceForge, but there’s an installer on the SourceForge downloads page called COLLADA_DOM_FX_RT_1.3.0_VC8.exe that has all three.
Hello. I want to build the FX and RT packages under Linux, but the make file does nothing :S. Wher can I find the intructions?
I should warn you that RT under Linux doesn’t work very well. The fact that you can’t control the camera with the mouse (or by any other means) is the biggest problem. There’s probably a simple fix for this, but RT isn’t really my domain.
but the make file does nothing
It could just be that you’re using an older version of RT that doesn’t have Linux support. If you use the latest code in the svn repo you should be able to build for Linux ok. Below are some instructions for that. The package installation instructions are for Ubuntu, but whatever distro you’re using should provide suitable packages for all the necessary software (with a few exceptions, noted below).
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Make sure you have Subversion installed: apt-get install subversion
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Make a folder to install to: mkdir collada-tools && cd collada-tools
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Get the latest version of DOM, FX, RT, and external-libs:
svn co https://collada-dom.svn.sourceforge.net … _DOM/trunk COLLADA_DOM
svn co https://collada-dom.svn.sourceforge.net … A_FX/trunk COLLADA_FX
svn co https://collada-dom.svn.sourceforge.net … A_RT/trunk COLLADA_RT
svn co https://collada-dom.svn.sourceforge.net … ernal-libs external-libs -
Install the third-party libs necessary to build the DOM: apt-get install libxml2-dev libpcre3-dev
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Install the third-party libs necessary for FX/RT: apt-get install nvidia-glx-dev nvidia-cg-toolkit freeglut3-dev
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Build (we add ‘RELEASE=1’ to each of the make commands to build release instead of debug):
make COLLADA_DOM RELEASE=1
make COLLADA_FX RELEASE=1
make external-libs/bullet RELEASE=1
make COLLADA_RT RELEASE=1 -
Run RT: COLLADA_RT/bin/linux_1.4/crtviewer some-model.dae
IMPORTANT NOTES about the packages mentioned above:
The package nvidia-glx-dev seems to be necessary for GL development on Ubuntu. If you’re using a different distro it might already provide everything you need. Also, if you’re using an ATI card you might need a different package.
For my system, I use the package nvidia-glx-new-dev instead of nvidia-glx-dev. If you’re on Ubuntu, you might want to check to see if you currently have nvidia-glx-new installed instead of nvidia-glx, in which case you should probably use nvidia-glx-new-dev.
The package nvidia-cg-toolkit is for CG. Your distro might not provide a package for this, in which case you can get CG directly from Nvidia.
Also, you might be interested in Feeling Viewer from Feeling Software. Last I checked they had a free version of Feeling Viewer for Mac/Linux. Feeling Viewer tends to work better than RT in my experience, especially under Linux where RT is basically broken due to the camera not working properly.