I was searching the net for anything on how Square Enix 3D Graphics people make their stuff( ya know, tutorials, any wireframes, behind the scences, do you know anywere I could find it?), and I came across a interesting article at http://www.devmaster.net/news/index.php?month=07&year=2004 . It states that "Sony is giving a tech talk at SIGGRAPH 2004 conference on Augurst 11th about an open graphics file format for interactive graphics and game industry called COLLADA, which is supported by major graphics companies such as Alias, Criterion, Discreet, and others. Sony claims that the file format will “dramatically improve today’s content pipeline with an open and extensible, collaboratively designed interchange file format that enables existing and future tools to scale up to the exciting challenges of the next wave of interactive content development.” This may be interesting to Blenderheads out there. Are consoles going back to computers? Anyway, just something I thought was insteresting. Man, wouldn’t it be cool if Blenderheads and some programmers and other artists got togeather and made a PS3 game. That would rock!
I’m in a bit of a rush but have a look here about Collada
http://www.continuousphysics.com/Bullet/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=12&sid=62800524cf31cd6a717b2a86c914a522
Also do a search for PS3 and OpenGL ES which is the graphics language for PS3.
This is good news indeed. I’ve always wanted something like this because most file conversion software loses something in the translation.
The trouble is keeping the file format able to handle new features in each piece of software. For example, Blender supports meta objects whereas Maya doesn’t so how do you export those? Perhaps software only reads as much of the geometry in the file it can.
I wonder if it will be an ascii format too so it will be slow to save. I don’t have much of a problem with that because it’s easier to manually correct and I wish Blender had one but I could see the performance and features aspect leading to fewer people adopting it.
The fact it is open and supported by Sony are major points in its favour though.
Something that caught my eye on the siggraph pages was about https://www.coin3d.org/ - a high performance toolkit for doing 3D software. I wonder how much more compact and efficient Blender’s code would be if it was built on that.