COLLADA and OBJ: what actually changes
COLLADA is an XML scene interchange format from the Khronos Group, now largely replaced by glTF. OBJ is plain-text geometry with an .mtl sidecar for materials — universal, and very old.
Meshes, normals and UV coordinates are translated between the two scene descriptions rather than re-tessellated, so the geometry you get out is the geometry you put in. The OBJ you get back keeps vertices, normals, UVs and material references, and gives up animation, rigs and scene hierarchy. Check materials and texture paths afterwards — that is where COLLADA and OBJ disagree most.
How it goes3 steps
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Add your COLLADA files
Drop them onto the box above or click Select File. Add as many .dae files as you like — the whole batch converts in one go, and duplicates are ignored.
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Confirm OBJ as the output
OBJ is already selected as the target format on this page. Tweak the options if you need something other than a straight OBJ file.
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Download your OBJ
Hit Convert and grab the finished OBJ files individually or as a single ZIP. Everything is deleted from the server once you have them.
Format facts
What each side of this conversion is good at, so you know what you are trading away.
Source
.dae
COLLADA
An XML scene interchange format from the Khronos Group, now largely replaced by glTF.
- Compression
- Lossless
- Transparency
- Not supported
- Keeps
- Scene graph, materials and animation
- Gives up
- File size discipline — XML makes for enormous scenes
Result
.obj
OBJ
Plain-text geometry with an .mtl sidecar for materials — universal, and very old.
- Compression
- Lossy
- Transparency
- Not supported
- Keeps
- Vertices, normals, UVs and material references
- Gives up
- Animation, rigs and scene hierarchy
Send COLLADA somewhere else
Every other format a DAE file can leave as.
From .dae
7 targets