COLLADA Refinery

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Product information
  • Name: COLLADA Refinery
  • Purpose: Content Pipeline Tool
  • Last updated: March 28, 2007
  • Current version: 2.0.3
  • Status: Released
  • OS: Win32
  • Forum
  • Report bugs
  • Maintainer: unknown
  • Contact for technical issues:

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COLLADA Refinery is an open-source content pipeline tool for COLLADA. It can run in interactive mode or in batch mode. A content pipeline is made of conditioners, small C++ functions interfacing with the COLLADA-DOM. One of the conditioner is the 'coherency check', a very important function that will test if a give COLLADA document is valid.

COLLADA Conditioner is a module component in COLLADA Refinery. Each conditioner can take a COLLADA document, perform a specific operation on the document, and pass the resulting document to the next conditioner. A series of conditioners is a pipeline that improves the state of COLLADA documents. See Portal:Conditioners directory.

Description

At the final production stage, developers generally transform COLLADA content into their own format and then apply their own conditioning pipeline or asset pipeline" to optimize the data, test the data for problems, merge data with other content, and "compile" the data in platform-specific format for use with a specific game engine or real-time application. The conditioning pipeline is generally a set of command-line utilities that are used with a build (makefile) mechanism to preprocess the content. The entire transformation process is equivalent to the source-code-to-binary-code transformation. The conditioning pipeline component is analogous to an optimizing compiler/linker.

Some, if not all, of the conditioning pipeline can be done in the COLLADA format. Refinery is an example of a COLLADA-based conditioning pipeline application. A user interface provides a way to create and test the pipeline, which is a set of interconnected conditioners. For example, going from polygons to optimized triangle mesh can be done with a triangulator conditioner followed by a triangle mesher. Or optimizing sampling an animation that was exported as a Bezier curve.

The COLLADA Refinery is open source, so additional individual conditioners can be developed to provide COLLADA users with a powerful, ready-to-use pipeline for their end application. To use the pipeline, a user would assemble a pipeline with the individual conditioners they need and then, as the final step, format the file to their application's binary-specific format, using their own plug-in for Refinery.


New release for COLLADA Refinery 2.0.3

March 29, 2007

  • Axisconverter
    add matrix support, remove exit(1) that cause unexpected exit.
  • coherencytest
    CHECK_unique_id will run faster, update check_skin that crash on null pointers.
  • copyrighter
    remove exit(1) that cause unexpected exit.
  • deindexer
    add resolveElement() to make sure getElement() will work, add null check to avoid crash.
  • kmzcleanup
    add null checks to avoid crash, remove exit(1) that cause unexpected exit.
  • packager
    remove exit(1) that cause unexpected exit.
  • Pipeline.java
    add line separators to separate output message between execute()

Mac OS X

NOTE: The OS X version is currently available only in SVN. See External links for a link to a precompiled UniversalBinary of a current SVN-version.

See Refinery on Mac OS X for build and installation instructions and a small example conditioner project using Xcode.

Screenshot

This shows a COLLADA Refinery tool window displaying a pipeline of two conditioners in series. These conditioners first triangulate all the polygons to triangles and then deindex the triangles.

RefineryScreenshot1.jpg

See also

External links