COLLADA (for ''COLLA''borative ''D''esign ''A''ctivity) is an interchange

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file format ...

for interactive 3D applications. It is managed by the nonprofit technology consortium, the Khronos Group, and has been adopted by ISO as a publicly available specification, ISO/PAS 17506. COLLADA defines an

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definitio ...

XML schema An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constra ...

for exchanging digital assets among various graphics

software applications Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

that might otherwise store their assets in incompatible file formats. COLLADA documents that describe digital assets are XML files, usually identified with a .dae (digital asset exchange)

filename extension A filename extension, file name extension or file extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file (e.g., .txt, .docx, .md). The extension indicates a characteristic of the file contents or its intended use. A filename extension is typically ...

History

Originally created at

Sony Computer Entertainment Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), formerly known as Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), is a multinational video game and digital entertainment company wholly owned by multinational conglomerate Sony. The SIE Group is made up of two legal co ...

by Rémi Arnaud and Mark C. Barnes, it has since become the property of the Khronos Group, a member-funded industry consortium, which now shares the copyright with Sony. The COLLADA schema and specification are freely available from the Khronos Group. The COLLADA DOM uses th
SCEA Shared Source License 1.0
Several graphics companies collaborated with

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

from COLLADA's beginnings to create a tool that would be useful to the widest possible audience, and COLLADA continues to evolve through the efforts of Khronos contributors. Early collaborators included

Alias Systems Corporation Alias Systems Corporation (formerly Alias Research, Alias Wavefront), headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was a software company that produced high-end 3D graphics software. Alias was eventually bought by Autodesk. History Alias Syste ...

Criterion Software Criterion Games is a British video game developer based in Guildford. Founded in January 1996 as a division of Criterion Software, it was owned by Canon Inc. until Criterion Software was sold to Electronic Arts in October 2004. Many of Criterio ...

, Autodesk, Inc., and Avid Technology. Dozens of commercial game studios and game engines have adopted the standard. In March 2011, Khronos released the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite (CTS). The suite allows applications that import and export COLLADA to test against a large suite of examples, ensuring that they conform properly to the specification. In July 2012, the CTS software was released on

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, allowing for community contributions. ISO/PAS 17506:2012 ''Industrial automation systems and integration -- COLLADA digital asset schema specification for 3D visualization of industrial data'' was published in July 2012.

Software tools

COLLADA was originally intended as an intermediate format for transporting data from one

digital content creation Content creation is the contribution of information to any media and most especially to digital media for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content is "something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of ...

(DCC) tool to another application. Applications exist to support the usage of several DCCs, including:

Game engines

Originally intended as an interchange format, many game engines now support COLLADA, including:

Applications

Some games and 3D applications have started to support COLLADA:

Libraries

There are several libraries available to read and write COLLADA files under programmatic control:
COLLADA DOM
( C++) - The COLLADA DOM is generated at compile-time from the COLLADA schema. It provides a low-level interface that eliminates the need for hand-written parsing routines, but is limited to reading and writing only one version of COLLADA, making it difficult to upgrade as new versions are released.
FCollada
(C++) - A utility library available from Feeling Software. In contrast to the COLLADA DOM, Feeling Software's FCollada provides a higher-level interface. FCollada is used i
ColladaMayaColladaMax
and several commercial game engines. The development of the open source part was discontinued by Feeling Software in 2008. The company continues to support its paying customers and licenses with improved versions of its software.
OpenCOLLADA
(C++) - The OpenCOLLADA project provides plugins for

3ds Max Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio and 3D Studio Max, is a professional 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images. It is developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capab ...

and Maya and the sources of utility libraries which were developed for the plugins.
pycollada
( Python) - A Python module for creating, editing and loading COLLADA. The library allows the application to load a COLLADA file and interact with it as a Python object. In addition, it supports creating a COLLADA Python object from scratch, as well as in-place editing.
Scene Kit
(

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXT ...

) - An Objective-C framework introduced in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion that allows reading, high-level manipulation and display of COLLADA scenes. * GLGE (

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

) - a JavaScript library presenting COLLADA files in a web browser using WebGL. *

Three.js Three.js is a cross-browser JavaScript library and application programming interface (API) used to create and display animated 3D computer graphics in a web browser using WebGL. The source code is hosted in a repository on GitHub. Overview ...

(JavaScript) - a 3D Javascript library capable of loading COLLADA files in a web browser. * StormEngineC (

) - Javascript 3D graphics library with option of loading COLLADA files.

Physics

As of version 1.4,

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...

support was added to the COLLADA standard. The goal is to allow content creators to define various physical attributes in visual scenes. For example, one can define surface material properties such as friction. Furthermore, content creators can define the physical attributes for the objects in the scene. This is done by defining the rigid bodies that should be linked to the visual representations. More features include support for ragdolls, collision volumes, physical constraints between physical objects, and global physical properties such as gravitation. Physics middleware products that support this standard include Bullet Physics Library, Open Dynamics Engine, PAL and NVIDIA's PhysX. These products support by reading the abstract found in the COLLADA file and transferring it into a form that the middleware can support and represent in a physical simulation. This also enables different middleware and tools to exchange physics data in a standardized manner. The

Physics Abstraction Layer The Physics Abstraction Layer (PAL) is an open-source cross-platform physical simulation API abstraction system. It is similar to a physics engine wrapper, however it is far more flexible providing extended abilities. PAL is free software, rel ...

provides support for COLLADA Physics to multiple physics engines that do not natively provide COLLADA support including JigLib, OpenTissue, Tokamak physics engine and True Axis. PAL also provides support for COLLADA to physics engines that also feature a native interface.

Versions

* 1.0: October 2004 * 1.2: February 2005 * 1.3: June 2005 * 1.4.0: January 2006; added features such as character skinning and morph targets, rigid body dynamics, support for OpenGL ES materials, and shader effects for multiple shading languages including the

Cg programming language The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...

, GLSL, and HLSL. First release through Khronos. * 1.4.1: July 2006; primarily a patch release. * 1.5.0: August 2008; added

kinematics Kinematics is a subfield of physics, developed in classical mechanics, that describes the motion of points, bodies (objects), and systems of bodies (groups of objects) without considering the forces that cause them to move. Kinematics, as a fiel ...

and B-rep as well as some FX redesign and

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accele ...

support. Formalised as ISO/PAS 17506:2012.