Open Asset Import Library

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Open Asset Import Library (aka 'Assimp') is a generic importer library for many digital asset formats, including COLLADA. The library is written in platform-independent, portable C++. Bindings for other languages and ecosystems are available.

Assimp provides one of the easiest and fastest ways to read Collada files. Please see the Assimp web page and the SF.net project page for more information.

Special notes and limitations

  • Assimp and its output data structure are geared towards realtime, polygonal computer graphics.
  • Being a generic importer library, only a subset of Collada is and can be supported. This doesn't mean Assimp can't read a single Collada file, it just means it won't read every detail.

Release announcement for Assimp 1.1 (March 2010)

A new release of the Open Asset Import Library (short: Assimp) is now available. Assimp is a portable library to load 3D scenes and models from 25+ different file formats, including Collada .dae, 3DSMax .3ds, Wavefront .obj, Lightwave .lwo, Milkshape .ms3d, Stanford .ply and DirectX .x. Assimp is geared mainly towards 3D engines and other GPU-accelerated rendering, providing the data in an straight-forward in-memory format and offering a multitude of post processing steps to further enhance the imported data. It supports meshes including multiple UVs, vertex colors and tangent space, bones, scene hierarchies, materials, node/bone animations, lights and cameras. The post processing steps include cleanup, validation, normal and tangent space generation, vertex cache optimisation, righthand to lefthand conversation and many more.

The new release contains all the updates, bugfixes and new features since the last release at May 2009. New formats included Collada, MS3D, Ogre XML Models and TrueSpace. The build system has been improved, VS8, VS9 and cmake are supported out of the box now. More formats are in development.

Assimp is written in portable C++ and has been tested on both 32 and 64bit, little and big endian system on Linux, Windows and Macintosh. A C++ and a plain-C interface is provided, bindings for Python and D are available. Assimp has no external dependencies except Boost, and an optional NOBOOST target is provided as well.