Point caching.

Other Standards COLLADA
1

Is anyone talking about writing out and reading vertex caches for deforming geometry through collada? There really needs to be support for this functionality in every major 3D application for so many reasons.

Of course it does make further editing of the scene in the destination package unworkable; however, that is not the point. One may use blast code in maya for example, and want to integrate that animation into a scene being done in max or xsi for rendering. Or you might have an animated noise deformation on an object in max that you want integrated into a maya scene. Or, or, or…

These are merely examples of deforming geometry that I’d like to make portable from 3d app to 3d app.

So, if anyone is already talking about this, please point me there so I can chime in. If not, can we all please talk about this?

The only commercial product I have seen that does this is point oven pro and it is not so great. We bought a copy for use with lightwave and maya and had a lot of problems with large data sets wherein it would just crash.

Here is the url for point oven.
http://www.ef9.com/ef9/PO.htm

2

I know that Guillaume supports some form of vertex keyframed animation export in ColladaMaya. I don’t know if this is a widely supported feature, and I’m not sure that it supports the baking of vertex positions. As far as I know you’re the first person who actually requests this type of feature, although I can see how this could be useful to get really high quality animations (e.g. muscle-based skinning) out of a DCC.

If your company is interested in funding such a feature, we would have no difficulty implementing it for Maya, and probably for Max too. Collada itself is probably already able to represent such data as of 1.3, although Guillaume is the Feeling Software expert in this domain so I’ll let him correct me if I’m wrong. :wink: