Maybe not a bug as such, more an issue with collada and 3D Studio Max but thought it was worth mentioning anyway in case someone else gets stumped with the same thing!

Basically I had a (very realistic) model of an RAF red arrow created for me by Fed for an augmented reality project I’m currently working on, complete with a material map (with very good baked in shadows that Fed likes to go on about). The code to get this into Papervision is very simple and should look like this.

var collada:Collada = new Collada("assets/meshes/red_arrow.dae");
addChild(collada);

This sort of worked, I had my model, but no material just a wire mesh as below and this warning message.

WARNING: Collada material _8_-_Default_1 not found.


(Click and drag the plane to rotate it)

After a bit of Googling I found a lot of people have had the same problem and to solve it I had to do the following.

var mat:BitmapFileMaterial = new BitmapFileMaterial("assets/image/red_arrow.jpg");
var mp:MaterialsList = new MaterialsList();
mp.addMaterial(mat, "mat0");

var collada:Collada = new Collada("assets/meshes/red_arrow.dae", mp);
addChild(collada);

But I still got the wire frame plane with no material, and the same error message! Well, this had me stumped, what was this mysterious ‘_8_-_Default_1’ collada material and why was it not being found? I did a quick search in the .dae file (it’s a lot of code but kind of makes sense) and I found 2 references to ‘_8_-_Default_1’. As a wild stab in the dark I replaced these for ‘mat0’, the name I gave to my BitmapFileMaterial in the code above and it worked!


(Click and drag the plane to rotate it, but now taking in all the glorious baked in shadows – thanks Fed)

Bit of a weird bug and I’m sure it’s caused by the .dae export from Studio Max rather than an error with Papervision but the above is a simple fix so I hope it helps people. I will post something on the augmented reality side of this project soon as I’m sure most people will be interested in that.

There are known issues on this page with regards to the fixed header. I’m looking at fixes and will have an updated version up soon! 🙂