Zanoza Software

23rd September 2026.DAE Import/Export updated with animation support

The most commonly used bridge between ZModeler and Blender - Collada DAE filter - was updated. It has an updated handling of hierarchy and materials, you will not mess with reassembling the hierarchy back in ZModeler upon importing the .dae model. Materials handling was improved to carry about more complex material setups than Collada DAE standard offers. In particular, an import and export tries to utilize DETAIL2, DETAIL3 textures and BUMPMAP textures inside the slots available for export. Textures assignment should not be lost, but the bump texture might appear on a different material channel/import, as there is no native bump map support in DAE.

And the most anticipated update in DAE filter - the Animation support is here. ZModeler can import and export animations inside .dae files and supports a variety of assignment and animation modes. In particular, animation of position-only or rotation-only can be used. It can animate scene objects as is, or animate skeleton's bones for the rigged meshes to animate. On import, the option "Import animations" is no longer a place-holder anymore, but is used to toggle import of animations from a model file.

An export has its own "Export animations" option to enable/disable storing of animations inside the .dae file. Additionally, it enables access to an option "Active animation only" to limit storage of current (active) animation only. This option, in particular, should be used to export animation to Blender, as it doesn't seem to load multiple animations from a .dae file when they animate the same armature (skeleton) object. In most of cases, you should toggle "Baked transform matrices" option when your exported file contains animations. This is a must when you export animated skeleton to Blender. The DAE format allows regular non-combined (or decomposed) tracks to be used in animations, but Blender when loading animations for armature expects them to be in "relative to armature's bind pose", which is not a Collada's standard. Using "Baked transform matrices" solves this issue. When you don't target your .dae to Blender, you are free to toggle off "Baked transform matrices", so individual tracks for position (if used) and rotation (if used) are exported. This simplifies the data and reduces the file size. When default rotation mode "axis + angle of rotation" is not supported by your target application (this is again a case with Blender), you can enable an option "Decompose rotation" that will export rotation in Euler angles (rotation on X axis, Y and Z as separate tracks/channels of animation). Rotation decomposition issue can also be solved by utilizing "Baked transform matrices" option too.

Additional limitation - animations can not be exported in .dae on their own, and every track requires a bind to a node that is a part of the export scene. So, make sure to bind tracks in Tracks Editor before you export. When animation contains a non bound track, this track will not be exported. If it has any children tracks (hierarchy of tracks used in Tracks editor), entire animation export will be omitted.

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