DAE to GLB API
Collada was the open interchange standard. glTF is the one that stuck.
DAE (Collada) was designed by Khronos as a vendor-neutral interchange format, and it succeeded — you still find it in SketchUp exports, Google Earth models, older asset libraries and architectural tooling. But it is verbose XML, models balloon to many megabytes, and browser support never really arrived. Khronos' own answer was glTF, and GLB is its single-file binary form.
Example
curl -X POST "https://apimycad.com/v1/mesh?to=glb" \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
-F "file=@model.dae" \
-o model.glbWhy bother converting
- Size. Collada stores every coordinate as text inside XML tags. The binary equivalent is dramatically smaller, which matters on a page a customer waits for.
- Parsing cost. A browser must parse all that XML before anything appears. GLB is read as a buffer.
- Support. three.js, Babylon.js,
<model-viewer>and AR viewers load GLB natively; Collada needs an extra loader, where it is supported at all.
What carries across
Mesh geometry, the scene node hierarchy and material assignments convert. Collada's more exotic corners — physics scenes, custom profiles, engine-specific extras — have no glTF equivalent and are not preserved. For static models, which is the overwhelming majority of DAE files in the wild, the result is a faithful, much lighter model.
Conversion runs one job at a time and returns the finished file in the response; there is no queue to poll. Uploads up to 50 MB.
Common uses
- Publishing SketchUp or architectural exports to a website
- Migrating a legacy Collada asset library to a modern viewer
- Cutting load times on pages that currently ship multi-megabyte XML models
- Feeding AR previews that require glTF/GLB input