poka.sh

 Docs

DAE

Generated by scripts/gen-format-pages.py from docs/data/format-metadata/, FILE_FORMATS.csv and docs/formats-master.csv. Do not edit by hand: change the source, then run the script.

Dae Preview.

At a glance
Original creator Sony Computer Entertainment (Rémi Arnaud and Mark C. Barnes); now held by the Khronos Group, which shares the copyright with Sony
First published 2004
Purpose COLLADA (Collaborative Design Activity): an open XML schema for exchanging 3D scenes, including geometry, materials, animation and physics, between authoring tools.
Extensions .dae
Poka parser poka-dae
Viewer poka-3d-viewer
Depth tier Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B2 Broad (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B2 Broad. The common content of the current and the common older versions is decoded. Some named features or versions are not, and are listed.

Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-16: parsers/poka-dae/src/main.rs only returns a Model marker with format dae; the work is the vendored three.js ColladaLoader.js (4116 lines) called from desktop/src/js/viewer-3d.js (case dae: TextDecoder utf-8 text, parse(text, empty path)), shared by the web app. Corpus holds cube_triangulate.dae, duck.dae and cube_UTF16LE.dae; no test runs them and nothing was run. Statements about texture loading and UTF-16 are judgement from the code. Covers COLLADA 1.4.x and 1.5.x geometry, materials, scene graph, skinning and keyframe animation.

What Poka does not read

  • external texture images beside the .dae (the loader gets an empty base path, so they should not resolve)
  • UTF-16 files (decoded as UTF-8; the loader then returns null and the viewer fails on .scene)
  • polygons primitive (skipped with a warning)
  • triangle strips and fans (not handled)
  • morph target animation
  • B-rep, spline and convex mesh geometry (COLLADA 1.5 B-rep)
  • physics models
  • kinematics only partly
  • unsupported animation transform types
  • only the first animation clip is played

Background

Wikipedia gives October 2004 as the initial release; COLLADA 1.4.0 (January 2006) was the first release through Khronos. PRONOM describes the Digital Asset Exchange file as an open-standard XML specification for 3D images and animations. The Poka module only marks the file as COLLADA; the frontend 3D viewer parses it with the three.js COLLADA loader, which logs the file's version but does not refuse any.

Versions

Version Identifier Poka Note
COLLADA 1.4.0 and 1.4.1 Not recorded January and July 2006 (Wikipedia).
COLLADA 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 Not recorded 1.5.1 (November 2025) corrects 1.5.0 with the same schema; 1.5 adds B-rep, geolocation and an OpenGL ES 2.0 profile (Khronos).

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

  • dae-parser (candidate; Apache-2.0 OR MIT; Rust; https://github.com/digama0/dae-parser) — v0.11.0 (October 2024); search snippets indicate COLLADA 1.4.1 only
  • Assimp (candidate; BSD-3-Clause; C++; https://github.com/assimp/assimp) — Lists DAE/Collada as an importer in doc/Fileformats.md; licence described on page as modified 3-clause BSD
  • pycollada (candidate; BSD-3-Clause; Python; https://github.com/pycollada/pycollada) — Loads COLLADA documents; licence inferred from COPYING text (BSD-3-Clause wording), not named on the page

Sources