Blender drops Collada, now what?

It probably wasn’t a huge surprise, but as of today it’s very real: Blender no longer supports Collada and its .dae files. We heard the warning back in May 2024 that Collada I/O would be removed, but back then it was just Legacy Status. As of Blender 5.0, it’s gone.

To most people, this probably means very little, but if you’re reading this, chances are that you have a bunch of DAE files lying around, or that you are a Second Life Resident looking to upload your meshes created in Blender, or maybe a game modder.

Let’s see exactly why that is, and what you can do instead.

Why does Blender not support Collada DAE anymore?

For Blender to understand Collada files, it’s using a third-party library called OpenCollada. And just like Collada itself, OpenCollada hasn’t seen any updates for a long time. Currently, the last release on GitHub is from 2018, and most of the files haven’t seen an editor for as long as 16 years. That kind of stuff makes the Blender folks uneasy for a bunch of reasons. One reason being security, and another one is that old code doesn’t play well with new code. Some of the libraries that OpenCollada is built on have moved on, but OpenCollada hasn’t, so in a way, time made OpenCollada incompatible with…OpenCollada. How very computer of it.

In the end, this move allows the Blender team to move faster and make Blender better.

What’s wrong with Collada anyway?

The short answer is that Collada is from another time. Another short answer is that it was never meant to be an end format, but an intermediate one. It was pretty great back in 2004, but being based on XML and being very verbose is not ideal for an end format. Sony created it as part of their games-making workflow, to transfer 3D data from one app to another.

Back then it was pretty innovative to have a single shared format between apps. It’s in the name, in fact: Collaborative Design Activity. I bet you thought it was Italian. Maybe not. Anyway. The idea was so good in fact, that Sony gave the format to Khronos, the industry consortium for 3D, so it could be maintained by the industry as a whole.

Only four years after its first release, Collada saw its last release.

What can you do now?

Luckily, the 3D industry is pretty vibrant and there are a ton of things you can use instead of DAE, depending on your situation. Let’s take a look.

Use GLB (glb, gltf)

This is what Blender now recommends instead. And not just Blender, but also the group behind Collada now recommends GLB. In fact GLB is the successor to Collada, and it’s more modern, lightweight, and most of all designed as an end format you can use in applications and on the web without the weight, complexity and speed tradeoffs with Collada.

Use FBX

If you cannot or will not use GLB, FBX still hangs out in Blender, and it’s still being improved. In fact in Blender 5.0 FBX is faster than ever. If you still need a Collada file, e.g. for Second Life or BeamNG.drive, you can export FBX from Blender and convert FBX to DAE right here on Convert3D. If you need to go the other way and convert FBX to DAE, well, we have you covered.

Use USD

If you’re in the VFX or animation industries, you most likely already know about Pixar’s open format USD (and its variants usdz, usda, usdc). It’s great for its advanced capabilities, but the complexity of USD comes with a few tradeoffs that you won’t have to make with GLB, so you might want to do a deep dive on exactly what you need here.

Use conversion tools

Well, you found one if you’re reading this. We support all of the formats mentioned in this post (and 70+ more in fact).

If you’re going to automate or just convert a ton of DAEs, check out the COLLADA2GLTF project. It’s a command-line interface. If you need more formats, check out Assimp.

If you need to convert DAE files on the fly, e.g. when users upload them, we have a Collada converter API for that.

Use Blender add-ons

Just because Blender removed Collada from the official release, it doesn’t mean people can’t create and install add-ons that add back Collada. It’s still early days, but people are building. One example is the Blender BeamNG CDAE which might be a little too specific for the BeamNG game, but just wanted to put it out there.

Just stay on Blender 4

I know, it’s painful not to get the latest improvements, but if you truly miss Collada enough, it’s an option. And Blender will not bug you about updating to Blender 5 because Blender is not that kind of software.

Next steps

Phew, I don’t even know what the next steps are. To be honest, I think Blender moving on from Collada is exactly what the industry needs to move on and close this heavy XML chapter. It might push other apps to do the same and encourage more teams to adopt more modern and better formats like GLTF.

And just for the record, we have no plans to remove Collada from Convert3D. In fact, we have some improvements planned.