How to convert Collada
to Open CASCADE?

Collada (COLLAborative Design Activity) is an interchange format for interactive 3D applications. Originally developed by Sony Computer Industry, now it is managed by the Khronos Group, a member-funded industry consortium, which now shares the copyright with Sony, Recently Collada has been well adopted by ISO as a publicly available specification, ISO/PAS 17506.

It is an XML-based schema that allows data exchange among 3D Digital Content Creation tools, such as SketchUp, Maya, 3ds Max, and Rhino. COLLADA files have the *.dae file extension, which stands for digital asset exchange.

In solid modeling and computer-aided design, boundary representation—often abbreviated as B-rep or BREP—is a method for representing shapes using the limits. A solid is represented as a collection of connected surface elements, the boundary between solid and non-solid.

Boundary representation of models are composed of two parts: topology and geometry (surfaces, curves and points). The main topological items are: faces, edges and vertices. A face is a bounded portion of a surface; an edge is a bounded piece of a curve and a vertex lies at a point. Other elements are the shell (a set of connected faces), the loop (a circuit of edges bounding a face) and loop-edge links (also known as winged edge links or half-edges) which are used to create the edge circuits. The edges are like the edges of a table, bounding a surface portion.

Compared to the constructive solid geometry (CSG) representation, which uses only primitive objects and Boolean operations to combine them, boundary representation is more flexible and has a much richer operation set. In addition to the Boolean operations, B-rep has extrusion (or sweeping), chamfer, blending, drafting, shelling, tweaking and other operations which make use of these.