Luxology® announced a new customized Collada plug-in for the soon to be announced modo® 401. Introducing a host of new features for exporting from modo and a totally new Collada importer, modo 401 users will be able to easily preserve key attributes of their modo creations for file export and round-trip manipulation even in complex 3D pipelines.

Luxology will be demonstrating its new Collada plug-in at the GDC 2009 Chalk Talk session called "New Collada I/O Plug-in for modo 401." Presented by Luxology's David Vasquez, the session will take place at the Intel Visual Adrenaline Lounge from 1:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 26.

"There should be no barriers between different applications in a 3D workflow," says Brad Peebler, president and founder of Luxology. "With our new Collada support, modo users will enjoy a transparent workflow that allows them to preserve crucial attributes of 3D files both into and out of modo."

An XML-based, open-source file format that enables 3D digital content creation tools to exchange assets, Collada is widely used for streamlining mixed-application workflows. Luxology has maintained the original features of Collada, including support for animation and multiple texture coordinate sets and the inclusion of metadata for search operations. The Collada tools in modo 401 have been tested using the Coherency Test Tool.

Another important capability Luxology has written into Collada is support for modo's powerful layered transform stacks, so that multiple transforms can be specified for a single item, allowing such constructs as orbital planetary motion to be represented with minimum overhead.