Jon Peddie Research has posted a complimentary wrap up from their TechWatch journal. Not covering specifically any Khronos API’s, they do cover a few of the Khronos Group members. Being the holiday season and seeing as how this is a complimentary offering from Jon Peddie, I thought it worth while letting you know about this great read.

Are you or your users tired of waiting for COLLADA files to import or export? Have you had out-of-memory problems processing very large scenes? Feeling Snappy is the answer you’ve been waiting for. It is a radically optimized version of Feeling Software’s popular COLLADA tools relied upon by hundreds of game and film studios throughout the world.

Benefits at a glance
* The same high-quality translators for Maya, 3ds Max and Motion Builder you’ve grown to love and rely on, now redesigned for amazing speed and improved memory usage.
* 8 to 10 times faster: less annoying delays, more productivity
* 5 to 10 times more memory efficient: import and export extremely complex scenes at record speed
* Up to 50% more memory available for your application after import, achieved through reduced memory fragmentation
* No changes to FCollada API: simply recompile and enjoy fast, memory-efficient performance through your whole pipeline.

Makehuman, the GPL innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional characters, has announced version 0.91 Release Candidate 1. Most notable is the ability to export in COLLADA or obj format. Export in COLLADA format allows a skeleton structure perfectly adapted to character to be obtained automatically. At the moment the vertex linking must be done by users, but for the version 0.9.2 full support for all features will be provided.

Right Hemisphere 5 Deep Server Software provides a unified, automated, and secure enterprise-wide media communication and collaboration environment. Anyone can use to improve the quality and speed of decision making among designers, managers, suppliers and customers. Featuring an abundance of new capabilities for authoring and rendering high quality line art illustrations, including a 2D and 3D symbol library; 2D line styles in 3D viewer, 2D vector and raster illustration outputs; easy thrust line creation with animation; illustration support with thick and thin rendering, color fill and more; a 2D alpha tool for creation, removal and manipulation of alpha channels in texture maps; and added drawing tools to improve technical illustration workflows. Also, new file format support for Microsoft 3D XAML, Google SketchUp, Autodesk FiLMBOX, Collada DAE, Silo 3D and WebCGM.

Blue Newt Software and Skew Matrix Software are pleased to announce the publication and immediate availability of OpenSceneGraph Reference Manual v2.2. Their book documents the current release of the cross-platform OpenGL-based scene graph API. The 640-page book is available as a PDF file or softbound. Bob Kuehne (Blue Newt Software) and Paul Martz (Skew Matrix Software) co-edited the book.

DMP announced three new courses, two getting started and one advanced course. The first OpenGL ES Programming training course (getting started) will be in February, the second OpenGL ES Programming training course (advanced) will be in March, while the third GLSL Programming training course (getting started) will follow in April. For more information on these courses, please visit the Khronos Group events page.

This video tutorial will walk you thru the creation of the XSI Mod Tool animated 3D logo for Papervision3D. The tutorial covers Papervision3D installation, Flash CS3 project setup, basic modeling and texturing technique in the XSI Mod Tool and the export of Papervision3D compatible COLLADA files.

Softimage releases Crosswalk 2.5, which brings several new functionalities and improvements to the XSI and XSI Mod Tool COLLADA plug-in. One of those is the Papervision3D compatibility. Crosswalk is Softimage’s solution to help transfer XSI content in and out of pipelines based on other applications, using various file formats including COLLADA. This standalone setup automatically detects existing installations, and installs/updates the appropriate plug-ins. It also contains the Crosswalk SDK, a file toolkit designed to facilitate the seamless integration of supported file formats into nearly any interactive media pipeline.