COLLADA, the digital entertainment industry's first standard interchange format for 3D graphics, defines an XML-based schema to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information - enabling multiple software packages to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains. It was developed in a cooperative effort between the industry's leading developers of applications, games, and platforms to streamline the interchange process. This book, written by the two driving forces behind COLLADA, is a complete guide to the COLLADA 1.4 specification. It provides content developers, application developers, and tool providers with a unique insight into the design of COLLADA that will help them to: exchange and fully preserve asset data; package programmable shader effects; control real-time physics engines; and build powerful content creation pipelines that can automatically condition and scale 3D geometry and texture assets for real-time playback on a wide diversity of platforms. tool vendors and game developers and has been adopted as an official industry standard by the Khronos Group.

Game Development Tool Essentials provides must-have tips and tricks from industry professionals for strengthening and streamlining your game tools pipeline. Everyone knows the game tools pipeline is important, but in the current environment of shrinking budgets and increased time pressure, developers often have to settle for inefficient, ad hoc, messy pipelines. This unique book will break you out of that cycle. The practical, expert insights contained within will enable you to work faster and more efficiently, so you can spend more time making cool things. Game Development Tool Essentials pools the knowledge and experience of working developers over four critical aspects of the game tools pipeline: asset and data management, geometry and models, Web tools, and programming. Within those sections, you will learn cutting-edge techniques on essential subjects such as COLLADA rendering, exporting and workflow; asset management and compiler architecture; and moving tools to the cloud. If you're a game developer, you need Game Development Tool Essentials. Covers readily available tools and tools developers can build themselves. Presents 96 code samples, 81 illustrations, and end-of-chapter references. Special chapter on moving tools to the cloud.

COLLADA is a COLLAborative Design Activity for establishing an open standard Digital Asset schema for interactive 3D applications. This book explains in detail how to use the COLLADA technology in a project utilizing 3D assets, and ultimately how to create an effective content creation pipeline for the most complex development. Errata are posted at http://collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/COLLADA_book.