Collada dae files?

[mkopack]

Hey gang,

Just getting started with Ogre (we're using 1.7.4 on Linux). I need to be able to pull in some collada models/meshes and my hunts through google and here on the forums have turned up a number of options, but I can't tell what's current, what's still supported, what's outdated, etc. I KNOW this can be done as both RViz and Gazebo (yes, I'm working on a ROS related robot UI project) use Ogre under the covers, but I don't know how they're doing it (and from what I've seen/read I suspect they each use a different mechanism since there's been reports of .dae files working properly in one and being a little messed up in the other at times.)

So, what IS the preferred mechanism for getting Collada .dae 's into Ogre for 1.7.4?

Any help is appreciated.

[amartin]

If you don't need to import them directly into your application then I'd suggest that you use a 3D modeling application that can import dae files and export to ogre mesh. I'm pretty sure that Blender, Maya and 3d Max all have plugins for the import and export you need. If you need to be able to import them directly then you'll need to write some custom code to read the dae file and then create a manual mesh instance from that or try find an existing open source version but I don't know of any off the top of my head.

[mkopack]

I'd prefer to pull them in directly vs convert before hand as that would allow me to be much more dynamic at runtime when we are given new models of the robot's parts...

So is there not a "standard" plugin made for this yet? I saw "Ogre COLLADA Plugin" http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-ind ... ada+Plugin but can't tell if that's recent or old or even functional.

There's this, but it looks dead: http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-ind ... greCollada

Then there's this one: http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-ind ... greCollada but it doesn't say which version of Ogre it's for.


I also found the OgreAssimp stuff, but not sure how to build it and can't tell if it works with 1.7.4...

I was really hoping for something packaged and ready to just plug in, not that would have to be built and such...

[amartin]

The main reason I suggest going through the editing tool is that you are using Ogre 1.7.4 which is really old and I have absolutely no idea what is and is not supported with that version. The current version is 1.9 so you'll be working 2 major version numbers behind. The advantage of going through the modeling tool is that you can fix any defects before exporting it and if it's for Robot parts if they don't change often it might not be too much of an overhead. Sorry I can't be much more helpful with that the only real time I had to deal with dae we decided to remove the support from our product entirely and just make it so the users could import .mesh files.

[mkopack]

Starting to think you might be right. I was trying to get the OgreAssimp stuff to build, but ran into problems, so decided to try to upgrade from Assimp2->3 and am now stuck in dpkg apt-get dependency hell... It won't let me remove v2 because it insists other things depend upon it, but it also won't let me install 3 because it insists there's a file it can't overwrite in /usr/lib/pkgconfig/assimp.pc. Even if I rm that file, it still won't do it and gives the same error. I'm utterly stumped...

Just going to have to do the conversion to .mesh files and live with it that way...

[c6burns]

Use aptitude instead of apt-get and it should propose to you a variety of solutions in order to unf@#k you. If it comes down to one file that multiple packages claim to own, you can edit the package definition to remove it ... though I haven't had to resort to such a thing in a long time. Then again I don't use unstable repo which might be why.

Going the Collada -> DCC Tool -> .mesh exporter route will save you a bunch of development time at the cost of time spent doing manual labour. Hard to say which is the path of least resistance without knowing how many models you'd have to export.

[Kojack]

I used OgreAssimp to load collada files from the game Amnesia A Machine For Pigs (all the levels are stored in dae files).
But I did it on windows with ogre 1.9, no idea about building assimp on linux.

If you don't mind a bit of coding, the Autodesk FBX sdk (free c++ library) allows you to load FBX, Collada and OBJ files. There's sdks for windows, osx, ios and linux. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc ... d=10775847
If you used it to load files, you'd be able to handle fbx as well (becoming more popular due to it being the preferred format for transferring to Unity).