apple today announced the new enhancements to ibooks for the ipad and the ibooks author free app for the mac, a tool that lets a person publish their own books.
the video is here: http://www.apple.com/education/#video-textbooks
this looks amazing for kids and students nowadays. i downloaded and opened the app to find that one of the widgets it supports allows us to import collada files!
How cool is that?!
I had a mediumly complex setup and it didn’t translate well. I was using tracking on the camera, but the collada file used the camera’s original angle. I used area lights, but the collada scene was black. A leaf was parented to an apple, but the leaf ended up where it was before I parented it.
CONCLUSION: you have to manual point your camera, use point lights, image textures don’t come through, move objects without parenting. Maybe UV Mapping will work.