DAE

DAE (COLLADA) is an open exchange format maintained by the Khronos Group, using XML to describe scene graphs, geometry, materials, textures, animations, and lights. Its goal is to enable lossless transfer of digital assets across different 3D creation tools. Software such as Blender and Maya support COLLADA import/export.

DAE's text-based structure results in large file sizes, and differences in COLLADA implementations across software can cause loss of materials or animations when transferring complex scenes between tools. In web real-time rendering scenarios, the glTF series has replaced COLLADA as the mainstream format, and DAE is now more commonly used for interoperability in traditional DCC toolchains.