DAE to GLB converter — Collada into one modern file
VTubeMe's DAE to GLB converter turns a Collada .dae into one .glb with its skeleton, skin weights, shape keys and textures inside. The unit the file declares is honoured. Free, five a day, up to 50 MB. Animation does not travel.
How do I convert a DAE (Collada) file to GLB?
Zip the .dae with its texture folder, drop the zip on this page and download one .glb.
- 1Zip the folder that holds the .dae and the images it uses, and drop the .zip into the box above (a lone .dae works too, and comes out untextured). Up to 50 MB; sign in when prompted.
- 2The file is opened with Blender's Collada reader on our server and written as a binary glTF. Its declared unit and up axis are applied, the skeleton and skin weights are carried, and the images are packed into the .glb.
- 3Download the .glb — one file, nothing to keep beside it.
- Accepts:
- a .dae, or a .zip of the .dae with its textures, up to 50 MB.
- Returns:
- one .glb with the textures inside.
- Costs:
- nothing, and no credits — an account, though: five conversions per account per rolling 24 hours, shared across all the free format pairs. Conversions that fail are not counted.
- Measured:
- 73 bones, 10 skinned meshes, 118 shape keys, 10 materials and 8 images in; the same out. A 100-unit cube declared in centimetres came out 1 m wide.
- Animation does not travel: the rig arrives in its bind pose.
- The rigged test file was written by Blender; Collada from other exporters varies and was not tested.
- A .dae uploaded without its textures converts untextured.
What actually happens to the file
Collada was the open interchange format of the late 2000s — SketchUp, Second Life, early Unity pipelines and a generation of game tools wrote it — and glTF is what replaced it. A .dae is XML with its textures in separate files; a .glb is one binary file with everything inside, which is what three.js, model-viewer and current engines want.
Unlike STL or PLY, a Collada file says what its numbers mean. A cube 100 units wide in a file declaring centimetres and Y-up came out one metre wide and standing upright: the unit is applied as a 0.01 scale on the object rather than by rewriting the vertices.
A rigged character survives. Our test file went in with 73 bones, 10 skinned meshes, 118 shape keys, 10 materials and 8 images beside it, and the GLB holds all of them, at the same 16,867 triangles and the same 1.81 m height once the skin is applied.
What this conversion cannot do
Measured on real files, not assumed. Everything below is a property of the formats or of the pipeline, and knowing it beforehand is cheaper than discovering it in your 3D tool.
Animation does not travel
The skeleton is written, the motion curves are not. Reading an FBX's animation costs about 1.5 GB of memory on a long clip, which is more than the converter container has, so the importer is asked to skip it and the exporter writes none. A file that arrives with a walk cycle leaves with the same rig in its bind pose. If what you have is the motion rather than the model, the FBX to VRMA converter is the tool that keeps it.
Textures only arrive if they come with the file
A .dae names its images by path and does not contain them. Uploaded alone, it converts to the right shape with the right materials and no pictures. Zip the folder that holds the .dae and its textures and upload the .zip: the test file went in as a .dae with eight images beside it and all eight arrived. A .dae that names an image by an absolute path of any operating system (C:\Users\... included), by a path written with backslashes, by a file:// or web address, or by a path leading out of the uploaded folder, or that pulls in another Collada document, is refused outright — re-export it as one document with relative texture paths written with forward slashes.
The rig was measured on a DAE written by Blender
The rigged file we measured was our own DAE output fed back in — 73 bones, 10 skinned meshes and 118 shape keys in, the same out. That proves the reader and the writer agree with each other, not that every exporter's Collada is read correctly. Files from SketchUp, older Maya and 3ds Max plug-ins or game rippers vary a great deal; open the result in a viewer before relying on it. Collada's importer also stops on XML it cannot parse rather than repairing it.
Uploads stop at 50 MB
This pair takes files up to 50 MB — half of what the GLB, FBX and OBJ pairs take among themselves, because dense scans and print files cost the converter far more memory per megabyte than a game character does. For scale: a binary STL of 50 MB is about a million triangles, and we converted one of 999,698. If your file is larger, decimate it first; MeshLab and Blender both do that without changing the format.
Five conversions a day, per account
This pair is free and takes no credits, but one account gets five conversions per rolling 24 hours across all the free format pairs together — the converter is one machine and this is what keeps it answering. Each slot frees itself 24 hours after it was used; nothing expires at midnight. Conversions that fail are not counted.
Frequently asked questions
Does the rig survive DAE to GLB?
On the file we measured, yes: 73 bones in and 73 out, 10 meshes still skinned, 118 shape keys still there. That file was a Collada written by Blender. Rigs from other Collada exporters are read by the same importer but were not part of the test, so check yours in a viewer. Open the result in the GLB viewer →
Do I upload the .dae alone or a zip?
A zip of the folder, whenever the model is textured. A .dae only names its images; they live beside it. Alone, it converts to the right shape with no pictures.
Will the model keep its real size?
Yes — unlike STL or PLY, a Collada file states its unit and its up axis, and both are honoured. A test cube 100 units wide in a file declaring centimetres and Y-up came out one metre wide and upright. The conversion is applied as a scale on the object, so the vertex numbers inside a GLB or FBX are still 100 with a 0.01 scale above them; the OBJ, which has no transforms, holds 1.0.
Can I open the .dae without converting it?
Yes — the DAE viewer runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded. Open the DAE viewer →
The other format pairs
All 30 are free, all run the same pipeline, and all say what they drop.
GLB to FBX
GLB in, FBX out — free, one file.
GLB to OBJ
GLB in, OBJ out — free, zipped with its materials.
FBX to GLB
FBX in, GLB out — free, one file.
OBJ to GLB
OBJ in, GLB out — free, one file.
STL to GLB
STL in, GLB out — free, one file.
PLY to GLB
PLY in, GLB out — free, one file.
DAE to FBX
DAE in, FBX out — free, one file.
DAE to OBJ
DAE in, OBJ out — free, zipped with its materials.
USDZ to GLB
USDZ in, GLB out — free, one file.
GLB to STL
GLB in, STL out — free, one file.
GLB to PLY
GLB in, PLY out — free, one file.
GLB to DAE
GLB in, DAE out — free, zipped with its textures.
GLB to USDZ
GLB in, USDZ out — free, one file.
FBX to DAE
FBX in, DAE out — free, zipped with its textures.
OBJ to DAE
OBJ in, DAE out — free, zipped with its textures.
Only want to look at the file? GLB viewer, FBX viewer and OBJ viewer all run on your own device — nothing is uploaded.
Is your model going into VTubing?
If the model is a rigged character and it is headed for VTubing, none of these containers is the destination — VSeeFace, Warudo and VNyan load VRM. The VRM converter takes the same rigged FBX or GLB, maps its skeleton onto the VRM humanoid and converts the materials.
Open the VRM converter