DAE Viewer — Open Collada Files Online
Open Collada .dae scenes with materials, textures and animation, straight in your browser.
Your DAE file is read and rendered entirely by your own browser. It is never uploaded to A23D, never stored, and never seen by anyone but you.
How to open a DAE file
No account, no plugin, no upload. Three steps and your model is on screen.
Drop in your file
Drag the .dae onto the viewer, or click to browse. If the model references separate material or texture files, drop the whole folder or a .zip so everything resolves.
Inspect the scene
Orbit, pan and zoom to look around. The inspector lists every mesh in the hierarchy with its triangle count, and reports the bounding box so you can sanity-check scale.
Convert or capture
Save a PNG of the viewport, or download the model converted to GLB, OBJ, STL, PLY or USDZ — all without the file leaving your browser.
What is a DAE (Collada) file?
Collada — COLLAborative Design Activity — is an XML-based interchange format originally created at Sony Computer Entertainment for PlayStation development and later handed to the Khronos Group. It became an ISO standard in 2013. Files use the .dae extension, for "digital asset exchange".
Collada was designed to be a lossless exchange format between authoring tools rather than a delivery format for runtime. It describes geometry, materials, textures, cameras, lights, skeletal rigs, skinning, animation, and even physics and kinematics. Very little is left out, which is why exports can be enormous.
Being XML makes a .dae readable in a text editor and easy to process with ordinary tooling, but also verbose. The same model is typically several times larger than an FBX and many times larger than a GLB, and parsing is correspondingly slower.
One genuinely useful feature is that Collada records its own up-axis and unit scale in the <asset> block at the top of the file. Where OBJ and STL leave software guessing, a well-formed Collada file states whether it is Y-up or Z-up and how many metres one unit represents.
Textures are referenced by relative path rather than embedded, so a .dae normally travels as a folder with its images. Drop the whole folder or a zip and the references resolve. Collada is also the payload inside Google Earth's KMZ files, which are simply zipped Collada.
DAE at a glance
- Extension
- .dae
- Developer
- Sony, now Khronos Group
- First released
- 2004
- Encoding
- XML
- Standard
- ISO/PAS 17506
- Up axis
- Declared in the file
- Stores
- Scenes, rigs, animation
What this viewer supports
- Full scene hierarchy and geometry
- Materials and referenced textures
- Declared up-axis and unit scale honoured
- Skeletal animation with scrubbing
- External textures via folder or .zip drop
- Physics and kinematics data
DAE viewer FAQs
The questions we get asked most about opening DAE files.
Is my Collada file uploaded anywhere?
No. The .dae and any textures you drop are read locally by your browser and rendered on your own GPU. Nothing is sent to A23D and nothing is stored.
Why does my DAE appear without textures?
Collada references texture images by relative path rather than embedding them. Dropping the .dae alone leaves those paths pointing at nothing. Drop the whole folder, or zip it first, and the images resolve automatically.
Does the viewer play Collada animation?
Yes. If the file contains animation clips, a timeline appears with a clip selector, play and pause, scrubbing and speed control. Skeletal animation is supported.
Why is my Collada file so large?
Collada is XML, so every coordinate is written out as text inside tags. That makes files several times larger than the equivalent FBX and far larger than GLB. Converting to GLB usually shrinks a model dramatically.
Is DAE still worth using?
It remains useful as a lossless exchange format and is still required by some pipelines, notably Google Earth and certain architectural tools. For delivering models to a website or app, GLB has largely replaced it.
Can I convert DAE to GLB or OBJ?
Yes. Load the file with its textures, then use Convert to and choose GLB, OBJ, STL, PLY or USDZ. The conversion runs in your browser with no upload.
More format viewers
All browser-based, all free, nothing uploaded.
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