Breaking speed record in COLLADA import/export

By Remi Arnaud (Intel) (3 posts) on December 22, 2008 at 6:39 pm

Sony and Intel are teaming together to provide better COLLADA export/import for Max and Maya. The German company Netallied has been working on a brand new implementation, and the result of this work is now available in Beta on sourceforge

Previous version of the exporters and importers were using a temporary storage mechanism. First the Maya/Max internal structure was browsed to create a COLLADA in-memory snapshot, and then this snapshot was exported in XML. Same mechanism backward for the importer. Problem with this is that the data gets allocated twice, and as everyone knows the data can be quite large, so large that it immediatly sends the computer in memory swap and it takes just forever to get a large model exported or imported (if you are lucky)

The new Max/Maya plug-ins are taking advantage of direct streaming, and SAX XML parsing, removing this intermediate memory alocation, and at the same time allowing further optimizations.

For example, importing a 60MB COLLADA file into 3dsMAX takes 1.8sec with the new SAX based approach, in comparison to the previous FCOLLADA based importer: 39.7sec.

Give it a try.. let me know if you think about this.

PS: This is a  Beta importer, the exporters are almost full feature and **fast**. Importers are not as complete - missing material, textures, polygons, shader - supported: mesh (triangles..), scene (node..)

Categories: Cool Software, Gaming, Open Source, Visual Computing, XML Software

Comments (4)

December 23, 2008 7:05 AM PST


Bruno Patatas		 This is great! For me one of the main problems when working with COLLADA is that the assets from our game development pipeline are extremely big on Mb's, and we had cases of .dae files that needed at least 1 minute to boot.
Looking forward to try more this new implementation, as soon as the importers become more stable.

Bruno
December 24, 2008 6:44 PM PST

Remi Arnaud (Intel)
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 I would be interested to see how this will impact your productivity. Crossing fingers that this new technology can reduce your loading time from 1 minute to less than 10 seconds!
February 13, 2009 7:32 PM PST


Adrian		 Does this new plug in support all of COLLADA physics? Blender seems to have the best COLLADA physics support at the moment.
March 19, 2009 6:11 PM PDT


SEO		 it does not support all of COLLADA phsyics. That would've been over the top

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