I’ve been working with my 3D apps over the last week and I’ve recently discovered COLLADA and have been doing export tests from Poser and Daz Studio into 3ds Max.

I have to say that, while it’s not absolutely perfect, COLLADA rocks!  And it’s FREE!

What Is It?

COLLADA is a new interchange file format designed to ease the exchanging of 3D assets between 3D applications.  Originally developed by Sony as the official development standard for the Playstation 3, COLLADA is now the property of the Khronos Group; a non-profit technology consortium.  COLLADA is now widely used by many game studios and supported by many game engines.

Bridging the Gap

People transitioning from entry level applications like Poser and Daz Studio to mid and professional level applications like Max and Maya usually run into a brick wall when getting their assets into other, more fully feature equipped applications.

Import processes were time consuming,  severely limited or required additional costly third party software.   pain out of the process.   But COLLADA takes a significant amount of the pain out of the process.

Over the years, the way Poser content is created has changed so COLLADA won’t work 100% of the time.   For example, the creature pictured above (Sanctum Art’s Alpha Male creature) was exported from Daz Studio then imported into 3d max via ColladaMAX from feelingsoftware.com.

It came into max completely rigged (woo!), but no matter what I’ve tried, the morph targets for things like the jaw opening, eyes blinking (etc.) didn’t work. (boo!)  The morph channels were there but they had no effect on the mesh.

However, the Daz’s Victoria 4.2 base figure (with Thorne’s Daveigh character morphs applied) worked really well!  As you can see, the expression morph targets I had selected for export work just fine.

She is also fully skinned, weight mapped and the bone structure is intact so she can be posed and aniamted.   Although tweaking needs to be done and the inverse kinematics restored, she’s actually quite usable almost as-is, directly from importation.

Old Tech

Unfortunately, Poser hasn’t evolved much over the years.  Its CG character technology is embarassingly antiquated by today’s standards and that’s proving to be an obstacle in getting its vast third party content working properly in other applications.

Poser users are stuck with an old joint parameter based system and clumsy, imprecise deformation tools called “magnets” and rely heavily on a large amount of morph targets (and Extended Morph Controls— rudimentary controller-style “hack” that allows morph targets to be controlled by joints or other morph targets) to accomplish things that are more efficiently handled with a true bones and vertex weighting system.

Currently, Smith Micro owns the IP to Poser and they need to play their cards right.  Previous Poser developers/IP owners (Curious Labs, eFrontier etc) have done nothing but build new features on top of rickety old code and technology.

If Poser is to survive, it needs to utilize more contemporary technology and integrate more efficiently with the professional level applications.

COLLADA’S Not A Perfect Solution

…but still a relatively good one if you want to bridge the gap between Poser/Daz Studio and other 3D applications.  The problems I experienced with Poser asset migration during my tests were outside the scope of COLLADA (old Poser tech, max’s original COLLADA plugin not coded properly etc), so I’m still quite happy with it.

I had always wanted to release free Poser characters and objects but one of my concerns is dedicating a significant amount of time creating 3D assets with limited application.

Now, COLLADA has given me a viable avenue for migrating Poser/Daz Studio assets to other applications and that makes creating 3D assets for these entry level applications an even more worthwhile endeavor.