COLLADA use case question

hi everybody,

i’m into a projekt where 3d-data has to be transferred from one application to another in realtime maybe via tcp over a loopback-port. since several parties are developing these applications and very likely we will seperate after this cooperation we would not like to build a proprietary protocol but we would like to use a standard format for the data exchange.

the data to be transferred isn’t very much (yet) but we would like to avoid as much overhead as possible. so it would be satisfying in our case to transfer 3d-data once at the beginning and then only to send the changes on the scene (changes on geometry, uv-coordinates, textures…)

my question to you is if you think collada is suitable for this. as i understood collada was built as an exchange format for dcc-tools so i’m not sure what we have to do to get collada doing what we want. if we have to use it in an awkward way and thus generate collada-data that maybe isn’t even valid at all it would be absurd to use it – then we’d just have a sham standardized format.

would you suggest collada for our task? or is there another format you would suggest? maybe U3D?

Have you looked at VERSE?

http://verse.blender.org/

yeah, NOW i did :slight_smile: thanks for the great hint, verse really looks very promising! unfortunately the whole uni-verse project seems to be a little orphaned? you don’t have any further information about that, do you?

just to get this right: collada would be a little misused in my case, am i right?

If you could give us a bit more information about the applications (max,maya,blender,…) i could tell you if its possible to share data between them. Be advised that verse covers only subdivision surfaces.

You’re asking that question on the COLLADA forum pages :wink: So what kind of answer do you expect? COLLADA is a XML based superset of U3D that includes support for BREP, Kinemetics, Animations (real animations), Physics, … So if you want to be prepared for any future developments better rely on COLLADA.

it’s none of them. i’m talking about our own applications, self developed, some of them based on VTK, some on openGL… who will communicate to share informations about 3d data, textures and user input.

i’m not 100% sure if this is a problem in my case: in terms of geometry i only have to share polygonal models. as far as i know subD’s are represented as poly-meshes, so i think i can transfer my geometry as it was a subD. do i miss a subtle problem here?

i know – and first i wanted to start my post with that remark but i was afraid i would maybe tread on your toes, questioning your objectiveness. :smiley: what i would expect anyway is an objective estimation :slight_smile:

btw: the future developments you are speaking of will not be useful for our kind of project so this is not a benefit of using collada in our case.