I can't import a COLLADA (.DAE) file into my scene

Question

There's a COLLADA file that I've been trying to Import into my scene but it's not working right. When I hit the "Import COLLADA" button after selecting it in the import screen nothing happens. It's not just my clipping distance either, the object doesn't exist in my outliner either and it's no where in my scene at all. It just isn't importing. I opened the file in Notepad to see if something was fishy in there, but the only thing I saw that might be causing the problem is that this files is a COLLADA version 1.40 I'm not familiar enough with blender or COLLADA to know if blender still supports this version, but it's just an observation I've made.

I opened up the System Console and saw this error message: Sax FWL Error: Texture with sid "Map__1-image" not found in effect with id "_3___Default-fx".

I've looked into the issue a bit and I think that the image is trying to communicate with a material and failing somehow. My only guess is that this file is out of date and the material it's referencing doesn't exist in blender (but I know very little about this stuff so I'm probably be wrong.)

I honestly don't even care about the material's or textures as long as I can import the model and have the Armature be functional. If I have to import it without the textures applied so be it (as long as the UV is still there and I can just slap them on later.) So I guess my question is, how do I fix this problem and Import my COLLADA model?

Contains the COLLADA file and associated textures: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4wly62hjgjxduym/AADEkuOZ4XiRu5TuTfyyb1jsa?dl=0

Answer 1

I encountered the exact same issue, and the following steps fixed it for me. I'll be posting the solution for anyone still encountering this issue that comes across this post, like I have.

I originally found this method in this forum post.

Steps to fix:

1. Open the .dae file with a text editor. Any will do, but for large enough files, make sure it supports regex find/replace as to not make the fix tedious.
2. Remove the content of all <diffuse></diffuse> tags. Only delete their content, not the tags themselves.
3. Save the file as .dae

Example :

<diffuse>
    <color sid="diffuse">0.800000  0.800000 0.800000 1.000000</color>
</diffuse>

becomes

<diffuse>
</diffuse>

With regex :

You can achieve this by replacing <diffuse>[\s\S]+?</diffuse> with <diffuse></diffuse> (add backslashes before / if necessary). However, if you have the option to make . include newline, the first regex just becomes <diffuse>.+?</diffuse>

Answer 2

If this error happens: IMB_loadifffile: couldn't get mapping
<init_from>file://C:\...</init_from> # replace any absolute file reference with a relative like: <init_from>../textures/SomeTexture.png</init_from> # and slash based on your OS (this example is for linux)

If this error happens: Sax FWL Error: Sax FWL (Warning): Texture with sid "..." not found in effect with id "...". do this: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/162121/9567 (I used geany as I cant find a sed way to replace multiline matching: "[\s\S]+?" with "" ). This is to complement @Syst3ms answer, but adding more steps as your file may have other problems.

If this error happens: Sax FWL (Warning): Source with id "SomethingA" in skin controller with id "SomethingA WhateverController" used in input with semantic ... could not be found!
strRegex='s@(="[^"]*) ([^" ]*")@\1_\2@g';sed -i -r -e "$strRegex" -e "$strRegex" -e "$strRegex" -e "$strRegex" -e "$strRegex" file.dae # replaces all spaces in identifiers with "_" (this example does it 5 times for each id).

This let you import the mesh with weights, and simple (no texture) materials.

The skeleton tho did not import on v2.93.4, so I had to import it on blender v2.76b and append later.

Using blender-2.93.4-linux-x64.