Verge3D 4.10 pre1 available!

Factory Tour Demo

We are excited to release a new demo that shows off an interactive 3D tour equipped with 360° panoramas. If you have ready-to-go panoramic photos or high-quality renders, you can integrate them into a real-time 3D scene for immersive experience. In our work we were inspired by this amazing Verge3D-powered virtual tour courtesy of the European Space Agency. Now you have a starter kit for creating interactives like that!

Key features:

• interactive bird’s-eye view of factory compartments
• spot navigation like in map street view
• real-time 3D and 360° views in one place
• annotated points of interest

Feel free to download the project files from the Asset Store once you install this preview version. The demo is available for all three supported 3D modeling tools.

New Puzzles

The newly available puzzle assign animation is kinda revolutionary even if it does just one simple thing – re-use an animation on a different object. This object is allowed to be a clone, or something appended with a new scene, thus opening the road to more flexible and efficient apps. It supports whole-object, shape key, material, and light intensity animation. Skinning animation cannot be assigned as it would require special preparation of animated objects – yet it’s still possible with JavaScript API.

As you can see from the above screenshot, this puzzle returns a new animation assigned to the target object. Once you get it, you can play this animation as usual.

Another new puzzle we called total materials. It counts and returns the overall number of materials assigned to an object. It can be used to iterate over an object’s materials to change some property in all of them in bulk. You can also use it to check if some object is a mesh.

Constructive Solid Geometry

We upgraded the make object from puzzle which is used to procedurally create new meshes through boolean operations. We also added a new demo to the Asset Store called Constructive Geometry to provide some usage examples. It was created out of the default cube and available for all three supported 3D modeling tools.

Under the hood, we replaced the OctreeCSG library by three-bvh-csg – this new library is smaller, 2-3x faster, and better integrated with Verge3D features.

Another important change is that the make object from puzzle obtained a new convenience option – clean – that automatically deletes original objects thus greatly reducing boilerplate.

There is more – it is now possible to use this puzzle with multi-material objects. It also preserves more properties from source objects such as shadow receiving and casting.

More on Puzzles

We adapted all the puzzles to a situation when an application is embedded in a page that is served from a different web domain (thus fixing the dreaded cross-origin problem). Particularly e-commerce and e-learning puzzles now work in such the case. Thanks for bringing this up on the forums.

The puzzle create object now assigns the shadow side property correctly, so shadows now work properly with procedurally created objects.

The puzzle set shadow param now works multi-material objects too.

The material selector puzzle no longer shows auxiliary (“stencil”) materials created by clipping planes.

We added options cols and rows to the get / set prop puzzle, thus enabling to set the number of rows and column in text area HTML elements. Thanks for bringing this up on the forums.

If some puzzle should happen to print an error to the browser console, the error message will include the puzzle’s name, so it’s now easy to pin down the faulty puzzle.

Finally, we tweaked and updated the tool-tips for various puzzles.

Blender-specific features

We reconsidered the highly advanced algorithm for baking animations keys that was introduced back in Verge3D 4.2. Having this feature didn’t really pay off. It prolonged export a lot and also required extra care from the user, e.g. when rotating objects (see this video by Xeon). So we decided to drop it until we figure out something better.

With this update we introduce a preliminary support for Blender 4.5 which is currently at alpha stage.

3ds Max-specific features

We updated and improved various aspects of the Firstperson Camera demo.

Maya-specific features

You can now use transparency with the Surface Shader node.

The Sampler Info node now works correctly if the system units are set to anything other than the default centimeters. This is relevant to the Point World, Point Obj, and Point Camera settings.

Both those nodes helped us create the Maya version of the new Factory Tour demo.

We fixed the export crash happened if any orphaned constraints were assigned to an object.

App Manager

Title, description and social media title and description in the App Manager settings now properly handle special characters such as quotation marks.

The browser is told to not spell-check certain text fields that do not require spell checking, like application name and folder, and others.

There were also some other minor tweaks in the App Manager here and there.

Optimization

With this release, we initiated the sun-setting of good old WebGL 1.0. We are planning to gradually upgrade Verge3D’s graphics features to WebGL 2.0.

This should improve the performance of Verge3D apps on contemporary devices the dominant majority of which supports WebGL 2.0. For this update, we migrated the post-effects, HDR rendering, and advanced anti-aliasing such as FXAA. We also managed to improve the visual quality of some of these features (especially FXAA), and achieved a somewhat faster application loading.

On the bandwidth side, we further optimized the shader code, cleaned up unused and deprecated features, and dropped unused CSS styles. The private JS methods and properties prefixed with the underscore are now obfuscated. All this reduced the file size of the engine runtime by 70kb.

Other improvements

Multi-material objects now assign readable names to their automatically generated submeshes. This makes such entities more operable from the programmer’s point of view. In addition, this creates a clearer scene graph when exporting from Verge3D to .gltf file.

We added the noscript tag to app templates and to all our demos, so the user will see a descriptive message rather than blank page if JavaScript is not available. This also helps to better search engine indexing of your apps.

We tweaked the camera distance and limits in the Standard app templates. The black background sphere was enlarged in the Dark templates (Verge3D for 3ds Max and Maya).

We dropped interleaved vertex buffers inherited from Three.js as this feature is no longer relevant to modern graphics hardware.

We reworked JS API for handling multi-material objects.

As usual, we reviewed various sections of the docs, where we supplied updated screenshots and added some new examples.

Bugs

We fixed the bug with incorrectly exported muted morph targets. Thanks for reporting this on the forums.

When deleting clipping planes, their cross-section materials will now be deleted too. This issue sometimes crippled the original object.

Another potential security issue in the WordPress plugin was discovered and dealt with, based on the feedback from third-party audit.

We fixed the rendering issue in the mobile Firefox browser making environment lighting darker then should be.

Finally, we fixed puzzles crashing when incorrect inputs are used with them. For example, the assign material puzzle with any non-mesh object crashed causing the entire Puzzle scenario to fail. Same happened with the set transform puzzle that chocked on non-numeric inputs – no more!