Hey guys,
With today's release we added color and texture map support for Collada (*.DAE) files. This means you can now export your designs for Full Color Sandstone directly from tools like Modo, Softimage XSI, Lightwave, Daz Studio and more (
see our full list of supported applications). There's no need to use external tools to convert from Collada to VRML2 or X3D anymore!
The color options that we now support are:
- Material
- Textures
- Color per vertex
While you can use multiple texture maps on one object, we're don't support multi-layer or overlapping textures. Also, only the diffuse material information will be used during printing. Any other texture types (specular, normal, displacement maps etc), will be discarded.
Uploading a Collada file with texture maps works identical to VRML2 and X3D files: you create a ZIP file that contains all the required files. There are two things to keep in mind here:
- The paths to the texture maps must be correct and cannot point to other folders. If you're not sure, you can test this by opening your Collada file in
MeshLab and see if it displays correctly. You can actually open Collada files in a text editor, so if you've got the stomach for it you can edit the file and check/fix the references to the texture maps manually.
- The ZIP file cannot contain any folders. Both the Collada- and texture files must be present in its root.
That's it - we hope this will make it even easier to create great full color designs!
Cheers,
Bart