On the 6th of June I put out the release of the 1.0 beta version of the RawKee X3D authoring plugin (open source ) for Alias' Maya 3D authoring software. For those who don't know, I work for the Archaeology Technologies Lab (ATL) at North Dakota State University. I'm the computer visualization manager there, though my BS is in anthropology and my masters degree will also be in anthro, I do quite a bit of software programming. As such I am the lead programmer of RawKee.For those who'd like more info about RawKee can visit the following URLs:http://rawkee.ndsu.edu/http://www.web3d.org/NDSU put out an official press release about RawKee on the 6th. The Web3D Consortium put it online at the following URL:http://www.web3d.org/news/releases/pdf/NDS...-06-06-2005.pdfExample files for which can be found at our On-A-Slant Reconstruction Web site:http://onaslant.ndsu.edu/Even if you're not intersted in X3D or Web3D you should check out the On-A-Slant web site anyway, as you can download video that's encoded to be played back on your Sony PSP.As my blog is subtittled as "My quest for java-based 3D gaming," I suppose now is a good time to point out the relevence of RawKee to this blog. One of the ATL's corporate partners is a company called Immediate Mode Interactive (IMI - http://www.imilabs.com/ ), a company that's developing a Java-based game engine called "Cosmic". This game engine has been demonstrated at the Sun Microsystems booth during GDC and Siggraph.Anyway, because IMI is a big user of Maya on OSX, it has decided to adopt X3D as Cosmic's 3D file format. As Maya users, IMI chose to use X3D over Collada because of the availability of RawKee for the OSX platform. The next big feature of RawKee export will be X3D character skinning in the form of the H-Anim spec. Once implemented, the Cosmic game engine will be able to exclusively use X3D for game content.So here I am, fighting on the side of X3D over Sony's Collada format, and Intel's U3D format.Aaron