Torque 3D Development - Chris Robertson and Collada

Last week we introduced the first look at at new tools for Torque 3D with the Torque Launcher. Today, we've got a very big announcement to follow that up. Though we've already talked about this some publicly in IRC and the forums, it's going to radically change Torque's content pipeline.

That's right! Torque 3D supports native loading of Collada files. With help from some initial R&D by Tim Gift, Chris Robertson picked up the Collada ball and has been running with it for months now. Russell Fincher has been helping some recently too, but we'll profile some of his work on Torque 3D later. Here's some more information about Chris...

Chris' Bio

"I'm a software developer from New Zealand. Been using Torque in my spare time for about 5 years. Best known for developing the Milkshape and Houdini DTS exporters."



"I'm working on adding Collada support to Torque, so the engine can now load a Collada model in the same way it loads a DTS (ie. as part of a script object or directly from the World Editor). I've also extended TSShapeConstructor to allow nodes, sequences and even meshes to be added, removed and renamed when a DTS or Collada shape is loaded. This is a great complement to the Collada loader, since you can take just about any model at all (such as from Google's 3D Warehouse) and "Torquify" it without having to muck around with importing and re-exporting."




Apparently New Zealand is too small for Google to acknowdege, but it's the land of Mordor and Flight of the Concords, so it's already more famous that Australia (though I am a Russell Crowe fan). Kiwis have better accents too.

Why is Collada important? Collada is an interchange format for 3D content that's currently supported by every major art tool (3ds Max, Maya, XSI, Blender, and more). This means that you can get your content into Torque easily using the Collada export option from your favorite art tool.

Now, we've had this working with Torque for some time now, but this is the kind of feature that's going to take many, many use cases before we're satisfied that it's 100%. To that end, we're inviting everyone to test this functionality with any and all content you can find and give us your feedback. Let us know where we still need to work out some kinks, and by the time we release Torque 3D, it will have the smoothest, easiest, most polished art pipeline out there for the widest number of tools.

How can you get started?

We've created a custom build of TGEA 1.8.1 with the Collada loading functionality wrapped in. This is a binary build, but it should provide everything you need to test out the new content pipeline. You'll find thorough documentation in the root install directory, and we're encouraging you to post your feedback in this forum. You can also read more technical details in this forum post. The Torque Collada Test is set to expire in less than a month (March 13th at 5:00 PM PST) so jump in as soon as possible and start testing!

Download Torque Collada Test

I had a quick run at what we could do with this new build, so I'll share it with you all as a quick walk-though.


Collada loading in Torque is a big deal, but it's one of many pieces that will change the way artists work with Torque 3D. There's a lot more to show. Please take some time and take the Torque 3D Collada Test build for a spin. Help us make Torque 3D even better with your feedback!

More development blogs to come. This is post #10.

Torque 3D development blogs:

• Post #1 - Kickoff
• Post #2 - Apparatus and Warrior Camp
• Post #3 - Luma's racing kit
• Post #4 - Josh Engebretson and Web Publishing
• Post #5 - Pricing and Licensing
• Post #6 - Pricing and Licensing CONTINUED
• Post #7 - Wetness & Precipitation
• Post #8 - Screeen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
• Post #9 - Matt Langley and the Torque Launcher
• Post #10 - Chris Robertson and Collada
• Post #11 - Depth of Field
• Post #12 - Advanced Lighting
• Post #13 - Soft Particles
• Post #14 - World Editor
• Post #15 - Pricing and Licensing ANNOUNCED!
• Post #16 - GDC Live Edition
• Post #17 - River & Road Editors
• Post #18 - Beta is UP!
• Post #19 - Light Rays, Undercity, Material Editor
• Post #20 - Mass Market Hardware
• Post #21 - Beta: Part Deux
• Post #22 - Marching Towards Beta 3
• Post #23 - pureLIGHT
• Post #24 - Lighting, Terrain, and Cloth
• Post #25 - Beta 3!
[li]Post #26 - Coming Soon!