Inexpensive COLLADA software information (list of software)

[Mick P.]

Since I've begun working with COLLADA I haven't really found any good software for it. I thought for new developers it would be good to compiler a list. Today I found some intriguing leads, so I thought I'd start some.

Conformance Tests
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/COLLADA-CTS

^For developers this may have some examples covering many use cases, and if you can set it up, a way to automatically run a battery of tests against your software.

FX Support. Claims extensive COLLDA support
https://developer.nvidia.com/fx-composer

^I haven't found any software that acknowledges the FX parts of COLLADA. Hopefully this will be just the thing. I still don't know how to round-trip it, since other software I know of just does lossy import/export. Maybe we will find enough software to cobble together a functional tool chain. If not we just have to invent one

[recpas]

I've no idea what COLLADA-CTS is, when I finished initial release of my lib I may try to learn/integrate it

fx composer didn't worked on my Windows 10 :/

[Mick P.]

I'd heard of the CTS thing, but had not hunted it down. It's a project from here at Khronos to automatically see if your COLLADA software is working or not. You do not integrate it, as much as a project maintainer uses it to verify their own project. I highlighted it because it should be a good source of example COLLADA files, even if you are not far enough along to consider running tests.

FX Composer worked for me. I am recommending it as a stepping stone to artists who use the video game platform I maintain until I can get around to more or less reinventing it. It does the necessary job in theory, although I don't have enough time to work on art myself often anymore, so in practice it may prove inadequate, but I'm pretty confident that given the amount of work that has gone into it it ought to up to facilitating very basic artistic needs.

Did you not say before you are using a MacOS system with Windows 10 emulated? Or is it dual-boot? I don't know. It should work. It tries to install Python which it may depend on. Let us know if you can find resources on making it work in your circumstances. The CTS project is also largely Python based.

Tell us if you know of other inexpensive software applications.

[recpas]

Yep, I'm using macOS and virtual Windows 10 Insider Preview (beta), I really want to use or test fx composer but it doesn't work even compatibility mode :/

It seems CTS is good software to find bugs, we can use it in unit tests, that is good!

Tell us if you know of other inexpensive software applications.

Currently I'm using these softwares to compare my progress (actually render results), Apple Preview / Quicklook, Xcode, FBXReview, Blender these are free and good softwares

Especially when you open COLLADA in Xcode, you can see COLLADA libs, scene as tree...

And there are lot of online shader tools (GLSL) but I think you are looking for something useful for test COLLADA, libs may be used in COLLADA lib...

Bullet may be used as sub library for physics part: https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3
But I may prefer do it myself, not sure yet

I don't know tools like fx composer, actually I've tried a lot of tools and couldn't remember what they are really for, I'd like to share if I discover somethings

[Mick P.]

I'm un-closing this thread, since it's not meant to be topical. For the record, I don't remember this forum having auto-closed/locked threads before.

If you want a thread un-closed I can do that for you. We will require a functional forum for long-running COLLADA discussions, and I don't know a better forum than this for the time being.