Animated DAE Files (ASCollada)

So I recently decided to try picking up how to import and play animated DAE models. To be honest, when I first started I was ubber confused cuz, well, there are no sample files, blog posts or clear documentation on how it works.

When I first started I thought that the ASCollada branch was the answer to all my problems (yes and no). I kept thinking that there was some special ASCollada file parser that I had to use or something (wrong). To import in animated DAE files all you have to do is declare a new DAE() object and then load in your .dae file that has been previously animated in a 3D app. The AS3 portion of it is pretty self explanitory (see source files).

Other questions I had when I was trying to make animated DAE files were, how do I set up my animations within other 3D programs? What animations are supported? What software is best for exporting? Well, I was able to answer some of these but not all.

1. How do I set up my animations? Easy, don't do anything special, just create a linear animation on your 3D app's timeline and export.

2. What animations are supported? I did 4 different tests. (1) I tried just plain old transform animations (ie. move, rotate, scale) and when I ran the exported file from Papervision it worked just fine. (2) Modifier animations, didn't work, it errored out. Not sure if its just not supported or if I did something wrong. I would guess that I did something wrong because when I applied the modifiers i created a stack of 3 or 4 different modifiers (no wonder it might error out, haha). (3) Morpher animation, this errored out as well. Again, not sure if its not supported or if I did something wrong. I created a Morpher for my object and used another object that had (again) a ton of modifiers applied. So, for test 2 and 3 I'll have to give them another try but use simplified animations. (4) Bones! Bones was successful! Weeee, thats good cuz its the one I was most interested in and Bones is what my attached example is based on.

3. What software to use? I'm a Swift 3D and 3ds max guru. I love these programs. So, obviously Swift 3D is great and wonderful but it is very limiting when it comes to this level of animation and on top of that Swift 3D doesn't export animation data to the collada file, not yet anyways. So, in the end I went with 3ds max. Unfortunately I don't own 3ds max so I downloaded the trial of 3ds max 2009, that didn't work and I got nothing but headaches from everything I attempted. So, I called up my old buddies from Electric Rain, they have various versions of 3ds max that I could try exporting Collada files from. NOTE, 3ds max 2009 has its own collada file export but it doesn't work with Papervision for some reason. If you step back and use an older version you will need the Feeling Software - ColladaMax plug-in (its free). I also tried using 3ds max 8 but that didn't work either, eventually I tried 3ds max 9 with the ColladaMax plug-in, and, SUCCESS! All off these various applications seemed to be the most happy in this setup (3ds max 9, ColladaMax Plug-in and Papervision 3D).

Once I saw (at least) a couple of my test animations working, I was satisfied!
See my quick and dirty bones test animation below (don't pick on me, I didn't do any crazy cool animation or anything... just something to get the job done).

So if you've been dying to figure this stuff out, I hope this post helps! I hope to do various exercises on this subject and become more fluent with how it all works. I'll be sure to report back with any additional finds I may come across. If you have prized info on this subject please post links in a comment below.

Example: click here
Flex Source: click here
Flash Source: click here