Rendering COLLADA Assets on Mac OS X with Scene Kit

Since Snow Leopard (10.6) was released in 2009, OS X has provided built-in support for COLLADA assets. So far, this support has enabled visualization of COLLADA assets in Preview and Quick Look. Developers using Quartz Composer have also been able to render COLLADA assets in their compositions, but until now, an API was still to be exposed. Now, with Mountain Lion (10.8), OS X has introduced a new 3D framework called Scene Kit that adds significant COLLADA functionality. This chapter explains how to use Scene Kit to render COLLADA assets. Incorporating a worked example, it offers an overview of Scene Kit and its relationship to COLLADA; shows how to integrate Scene Kit with Xcode; presents key aspects of the Scene Kit API like COLLADA scene import and scene graph manipulations, animations, and rendering; and touches on more advanced topics such as custom rendering. To get the most out of this chapter, it is recommended but not required that you have a basic knowledge of COLLADA and a working knowledge of Objective-C.