Problem with DAE export

Problem with DAE export

Xcode supports DAE files. I created a simple scene and imported it. It worked great. It even had the names of each component correct.

I tried the same thing with animation. Although the the take worked, I got three of them (I only had one) and there were all unnamed. Is this a bug with the DAE exporter?

It is always the difficult questions that are important.

Hi,
Collada animations are normally imported nicely by XCode. But please be aware that just the animation of the current take is exported to Collada. So if you have various takes in your scene make sure that you've selected the right one. Also dynamics simulations aren't not exported to any file format. Also check that animation export is turned on in the .dae exporter preferences.

Bye
Martin

Thanks Martin. I was looking at a sample file for a SceneKit game. They seem to have 1 .dae file for each object, then each animation is in a separate file without the objects. Is there a way to do this in Cheetah3D?

With Cheetah3D it's not possible to export animations without objects. Saving every object and animations in its own dae doesn't sound to comfortable anyways.:wink:

I've exported the Alienwalk.jas example scene to .dae and Xcode opened it fine. So the Cheetah3D 6.3 dae output should work fine with Xcode.

Bye
Martin

One thing that would be helpful is the ability to export all takes as one take.

You actually can just export animations, and having individual files with a single animation can actually be easier to keep track of and work with.

All you have to do is create your template model with all the joints, skeletons, and geometry and export that as a .dae file. Then choose the animation Take you want to export, and keep all your joints but delete all of your geometries. Export that as a .dae file.

I did this to make an animation with Xcode for use with SceneKit and I was able to make 3 animation files, one for each of the takes I had created, and apply them correctly to the template model. As long as all of the joints are named the same in the template and the animation you should be fine. Make sure you don't make any changes between the time you export the full template and when you export the animations though, just to be certain that everything stays lined up correctly.

The benefits were enormous, the file size for the full template model was about 10 Mb. The file size for just an animation was 131 kb.

Hope this helps.

podperson said:

One thing that would be helpful is the ability to export all takes as one take.

Click to expand...

I've had issues with this. I ended up exporting each take into different dae files. But then I consolidated it all into one file manually.

I wrote my own xml importer for my game. I tweaked my parsing to handle it all in one file. But the main issues is the ids needed to match for each export I did. So, when I pasted into one .dae file it would still work. Of course, this is now a modified .dae file. I added a take element to the xml.

<library_animations>
<take num="0"/>
<animation id="locator017Node_transform"></animation>
....
<take num="1"/>
<animation id="locator017Node_transform"></animation>
....
</library_animations>