PixelBox Academy to Deliver COLLADA Training

PixelBox Academy to Deliver COLLADA Training

Courses on use of COLLADA to construct state-of-the-art content creation pipelines;
Industry-wide Khronos open standard originally created by Sony Computer Entertainment for PLAYSTATION®3

3rd January, 2006 – PixelBox Academy, Amarante, Portugal – PixelBox Academy today announced that it will provide worldwide training and support services for COLLADA™, the industry open standard for seamlessly communicating digital assets between 3D authoring packages. The courses will teach how to use COLLADA to optimize studio workflow by combining multiple state-of-the-art software tools into advanced authoring pipelines for digital content creation. Originally initiated by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. to accelerate the creation of PLAYSTATION®3 content, COLLADA is now an open standard being developed by the Khronos Group. Numerous companies have supported and developed COLLADA including 3Dlabs, Alias, Aegia, Autodesk, ATI, Havok, NVIDIA and Softimage.

PixelBox Academy will open a COLLADA section in the Academy Shader Farm and provide online training modules to cover many aspects of COLLADA: such as how to write a program to use COLLADA data; how to create code for rendering COLLADA geometry in OpenGL® and Direct X; and how to use FX Composer 2.0 jointly with Maya, 3D Studio Max and Softimage XSI to create and apply shader effects. In the summer of 2006 PixelBox Academy will offer a COLLADA Foundation Course at the Academy headquarters to provide designers with the conceptual and practical foundation needed to take full advantage of the range of creative opportunities created by COLLADA. For more information on PixelBox Academy’s COLLADA training and support please visit www.pixelboxacademy.com or call +351 (255) 431-477.

PixelBox Academy is also happy to announce that Rémi Arnaud, Graphics Architect at Sony Computer Entertainment US Research and Development department and one of COLLADA creators, is now a member of PixelBox Academy’s Advisory Board. By gaining a seat in the Advisory Board, Rémi will consult on general Company strategy regarding the guidelines to be used in the development of all COLLADA Courses.

“COLLADA is already a proven open standard and with the high-quality of available COLLADA translators and the upcoming FX Composer 2.0 tool from NVIDIA we decided it was time to fill an emerging industry need and become the pioneers in COLLADA training,” said Bruno Patatas, founder and CEO of PixelBox Academy. “With the upcoming opening of our new facilities and our already well established online training resources we are in position to offer training and support uniquely focused on the real-world needs of 3D designers. Our online courses and the COLLADA Foundation Course will help to establish a skilled COLLADA user base, giving everyone an opportunity to take advantage of this truly enabling open standard.”

“Khronos and the COLLADA working group warmly welcome PixelBox Academy’s decision to provide cutting-edge training and support for COLLADA and it will provide a very synergistic addition to their existing courses on advanced 3D authoring,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “A vibrant user base is the foundation of any successful industry standard and Khronos will work very closely with PixelBox to help ensure that these groundbreaking courses contain the very latest insights into this enabling standard.”

About COLLADA
COLLADA (“COLLAborative Design Activity”) is an open standard for the interactive entertainment industry that defines an XML-based schema for 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information. This enables multiple software packages to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains. COLLADA include support for programmable shaders authored and packaged using the OpenGL, OpenGL® ES and Direct3D shading languages so that leading authoring tools can work effectively together to create advanced 3D applications and assets.

About PixelBox Academy
PixelBox Academy celebrates and sponsors achievement, excellence and innovation in the visual effects industry. PixelBox Academy supports Technical Directors by offering a range of courses, workshops, and tutorials, all wrapped in a world class e-learning technology that offers a wide set of services to educate in the new fields of rendering and shaders development technologies.

About Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™ and OpenSL™ ES to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

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PixelBox Academy and the PixelBox Academy Logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of PixelBox Academy Inc. in Portugal and/or other countries. Khronos, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.