I've been fairly happy using 3dsMax -> FBX SDK for all of our work. It seems to behave far more consistently than anything else, plus the FBX SDK can load Collada and a few other things. The FBX APIs are kind of wonky and it's a hassle to do initial setup, but once it works it's pretty solid.

Rob,thanks for this opinion.I decided to use COLLADA,because i don't need anything but 3dsmax....

That doesn’t make sense. 3DS Max can export .FBX files just as well as .DAE files. What RobTheBloke wrote in reply to my reply is almost entirely inaccurate. For example:

Being able to evaluate animation and geometry deformations does not help you transfer data, it's just another feature that you won't be using within your game.

Transferring data, no, converting data, yes. As mentioned there are multiple ways to handle interpolations in animations, for example between X and X+1 keyframes we use stepped interpolation, meaning we pick either value from X or X+1 and use that the whole way between key frames. And which value we pick (X’s or X+1’s) is a parameter of the interpolation, expensive to evaluate at run-time. Again, you want to reduce this to nothing but linear interpolation at run-time to avoid run-time overhead of branches etc. for various types of interpolations.

That's one of the worst compression schemes available for runtime animation systems. It fails to provide any random access capabilities at all, so you'll be forced to utilise precious memory bandwidth to find the correct keys. It simply won't scale.

Being unable to provide random access to any time within the animation is simply false. Either way it’s a key-frame system. The only difference is that with my suggested way you always know how to interpolate between key frames and there are no branches. Either way, you can always go to any point in any animation—as far as that is concerned there is no difference in run-time overhead or capability.
This reply simply doesn’t make sense, as both methods use key-frames and allow random access. The method I explained avoids run-time branches because the interpolation is known in advance. Knowing the method of interpolation in advance does not prevent random access. It’s simply absurd to say so.


I am sorry if you have decided to use COLLADA. I outline their primary differences in my upcoming book and FBX is, despite its shortcomings, still the way to go. FBX actually has an SDK, for example. Autodesk is also aware that I am adding a chapter about the FBX SDK in my book and have agreed to fact-check it, but at the same time they know this is going to be a published work that reflects back on them, and I believe they are going to fix some of the gripes I have with the FBX SDK. We will see if that actually happens, but in the case of COLLADA we can be certain it won’t. They both have severe shortcomings in a lot of ways but at least there is hope for FBX.


L. Spiro

The FBX docs are... minimal. The way to learn to use it is basically to follow their ViewScene sample code, which actually goes through all the necessary (and many optional) steps to load stuff. It's not the easiest thing, and I definitely had a day or two of frustration trying to understand what they were doing. Once things fall into place though, it works well.

And as far as I know it's free and fine for commercial.