Significant Features of the COLLADA Exporter for the COLLADA DAE File Exporter

• An intelligent 3D exporter that can reconfigure its COLLADA output structure in a variety of ways to provide for flexibility in repurposing any 3D scene into a properly formatted COLLADA 3D document file.
  
  
• Exposed user options across 8 panels to provide you with direct control over the COLLADA scene export process. Many options have also been added during the development process of this exporter which help smooth quirks associated with COLLADA files, or which help create a "nice looking 3D model" in downstream COLLADA viewers without having to tweak the source scene by hand.
  
  
• All main Okino 3D primitives will be converted and output as COLLADA meshes with optional multiple sets of vertex normals, vertex (u,v) texture coordinates, vertex colors, vertex bone deformation skinning weights and/or vertex tangent vectors (if available). Flexible control is provided on which type of COLLADA mesh primitive is used: (1) <triangles> (most commonly implemented in destination COLLADA programs), (2) Explicit n-sided <polygons> with no holes, (3) Explicit n-sided <polygons> with optional holes, or (4) <polylist> which outputs the smallest and most compact COLLADA files in most cases.
  
  
• Complete integration of Okino's 2D and 3D spline shape cross conversion engine. This is a very powerful aspect of the core Okino conversion software which allows 2D and 3D cubic spline curves, NURBS curves and spline shapes to be converted into downstream closed cubic curves, polylines, meshes or other higher order primitives. How these are output to COLLADA is controlled via the various drop-down combo boxes on the 'Curve Output Options' panel. When requested, cubic and NURBS curves will be exported to COLLADA either as 3D polylines or cubic curves (linear, B-Spline or Bezier). Note: support for spline curves in other 3D packages doesn't appear to be too popular, if supported at all.
  
  
• Excellent and robust support for COLLADA "skinned mesh" and skeleton export, which ties into the Okino Arctic toolkit. This allows PolyTrans to cross convert skinned mesh, animation and skeleton data between COLLADA, 3ds Max, CINEMA 4D, Maya, LightWave, DirectX, U3D and FBX file formats, with proper bone re-orientation, off-axis scaling removal, and so forth.
  
  
• While there are many key aspects of the COLLADA exporter (geometry, skinning, skeletons and animation), material output is one of the defining aspects of the Okino COLLADA exporter. Much attention to detail was allocated to outputting all key Okino material and texture related information, as well as additional Okino/Maya/3ds-Max extensions:
  
  
  • Ambient/diffuse/specular/luminous material colors
  • Ambient/diffuse/specular/luminous/opacity/bump texture maps with a slew of related parameters and Okino/Maya/3ds-Max extensions.
  • Spherical and cubical environment maps, with Okino parameter extensions
  • Ambient/diffuse/specular/luminous/IOR/reflection shading coefficients including controls to tweak any of these parameters prior to output to obtain an ideal shader conversion.
  • Phong and Blinn shader specular highlight parameters
  • Face, highlight and edge opacity
  • Ability to embed a texture's UV scale and offset values into the mesh data or into the shader definition as <extra> tags.
  • Options to flip the 'sense' of transparency for those programs which implement RGB_ZERO transparency mode incorrectly.
  • Optional UI-controlled <double_sided> flag for 3ds Max, Google Earth & Okino.
  
  
• Exports point, spot, directional and ambient light sources and their related parameters. Attenuation types: constant, linear and quadratic. Fall-off attenuation. Unity light distance. Light color with embedded intensity.
  
  
• 18 predefined light configurations can be optionally chosen during export, which allows lights to be automatically added to the exported COLLADA scene if none are available in the source scene.
  
  
• Perspective or orthographic cameras. Horizontal & vertical FOV. Near and far clip plane distances. Distance from camera's look-from to look-at location.
  
  
• Mesh geometry tweaking, modification and transformations via automated operations made available by Okino's suite of polygon reduction and transformation routines. Ideal as a means to "clean up" the source meshes and apply 80-95% pre-polygon reduction to the models prior to export to COLLADA. The global transformation dialog box allows for these variety of transformations to be applied to the entire exported scene: Center all geometry at the origin, Make all geometry sit on the Y=0 horizontal plane, Scale geometry to be no larger than XxYxZ units, Scale, Shear, Rotate and Translate.
  
  
• Object animation output with control over interpolation type (constant, linear or Bezier), Euler rotation order (6 types), resampling options and algorithms to maintain Euler continuity. Okino's Arctic toolkit provides the front-end to the COLLADA animation export system, and thus fully utilizes its "dense matrix" keyframe resampling and reduction algorithms. Arctic also is used to ensure that all Euler animation output is properly exported (because Euler animation conversion can be fraught with problems).
  
  
• Automatic texture bitmap file conversion to and from all key 2D bitmap image file formats. Images can be automatically resized to 2x2 to 8192x8192 pixels in size. Complete control is also provided over texture filepath manipulation.
  
  
• Meta data is output using the Okino <metadata_collection> and <metadata> extensions for meta data associated with the Okino global scene or for instances (geometry), cameras, lights and materials (surfaces).
  
  
• Output to either a disk based file or to the clipboard. The disk-based file can automatically be previewed in the default COLLADA file viewer.
  
  
• Full support for instancing to reduce file size.