Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3-8. The FBX Converter can be used to convert among FBX, COLLADA, 3DS, OBJ, and DXF
If you use an engine supporting FBX files, it will most likely use the FBX SDK as well. There are many samples in
the SDK, and if you keep your feature set to a minimum, you can get to the 3D data very quickly. However, the more
features you want to support, the more you have to fight with the SDK, strange naming, and other issues, which is
certainly not much fun for non-C++ programmers.
COLLADA Document Format
The COLLADA document format uses the extension . dae (digital asset exchange) and is basically just an XML
file describing the 3D scene (see Figure 3-9 for an example). It is very extensible because each developer can add
and extract his own nodes easily into existing files. As with any scene graph-based format, you choose to ignore
unsupported nodes, but in our opinion the COLLADA format makes it much easier to extract useful information and
ignore the rest. There are also tons of open source libraries, tools, and plug-ins available, which made this format
very popular five years ago. COLLADA files are also supported by most engines and 3D tools. However, the format is
not as widely used in games anymore because Autodesk has pushed their FBX format, and most game engines and
frameworks support FBX files better than COLLADA.
 
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