Verge3D 4.10 pre2 available!

Precise Referencing in Dynamic Scenes

In Verge3D 4.9, we introduced a series of puzzle-based features for accessing dynamically loaded or cloned materials and textures that share a same name. With this update, we focused on objects and animations, providing you with means to control every individual model.

This was achieved by adding two new advanced options to the puzzle get objects from: enable name filter and return unique object ids.

The first option is for filtering off specific objects by their names. You can use whole names of just parts of names (starting with, ending with, etc). For example, if you’ve got 100 chair variants with their names all starting with “Chair”, you can select them in bulk by name, without the need to add them first into a group in the 3D tool, or put them into a list puzzle.

The second option is very important in the case when having just the name is not sufficient – this is when objects are appended dynamically from another glTF file and happen to have same names. Another use-case is when you copy a parent object, which won’t stop all the children from keeping their original names.

Consider the following example: we want to reuse the same Cube from the same glTF file. But there is a problem – we cannot access the object from the second scene at all, because this is the same file and the object keeps its name.

This puzzle option solves this by offering a unique reference to an object by its internal ID. You can then use this ID (as it was with materials, it looks something like 5c464bf0-043a-40ee-b864-5c026436d7de) to pass it into other object puzzles directly, or put it into selectors, lists, or textual puzzles for further use.

Besides, the very same get objects from puzzle also obtained the option called first. It returns just one object that managed to satisfy the search criteria instead of a list.

The puzzle get animations of received a similar upgrade. Its new option return unique animation ids allows you to refer to an individual animated object even if it shares a same name. Similarly to objects, the obtained unique ID can be plugged into other animation puzzles.

Finally, the picking time! The puzzle when clicked obtained a similar new option – unique picked object id. When enabled, it will pass a unique ID into the supplemental puzzle picked object instead of the object’s name. Once again, this allows you to assign click listeners to models that are appended dynamically or created procedurally.

CSS 3D Renderer

Embedding a whole website, YouTube videos or custom web UI into the 3D scene can now be done in a moment. We made it possible by integrating the CSS 3D transform functionality into the engine core. The embedded web content remains fully interactive, so you can post on the community forums, watch videos and even run another Verge3D scene inside!

How you do this? Just drop a create object puzzle, select plane with html, and change the web link.

We updated our simplistic Htmlmixer demo which no longer needs any JavaScript to run, and made it available for all three supported modeling tools. We’ll probably make a full-fledged demo out of this.

Blender-specific features

Here is one important usability improvement for Blender users – the Bake Modifiers checkbox can now be used with morphed objects! In other words, the shape keys are no longer baked and therefore become available for manipulation in Puzzles (this issue is thoroughly described in this video by Xeon).

We supported two shader nodes introduced in the upcoming Blender 4.5 – Vector Math → Power and Vector Math → Sign.

We also supported new params for lights that appeared in Blender 4.5 – Temperature, Exposure (for all lights), and Normalize (for Area lights only).

The node Math’s param Floored Modulo is now supported.

We fixed the engine crash when using the node Bump as of Blender 4.4 or later. Thanks for reporting this issue on the forums.

Also nodes Subsurface Scattering and Volume Scatter, for which we maintain a simplistic implementation, no longer crash.

Finally, we adapted the Ambient Occlusion demo for the latest Blender versions.

Puzzles

Objects added by the puzzle create object now cast and receive shadows by default, which is consistent with the behavior of the modeling tools.

In a situation when a Clipping Plane is used together with the puzzle make from, the Clipping Plane‘s option Negated now works properly.

The puzzle play animation set to auto mode now respects the Loop Mode and Repeat Count params assigned in the modeling tools. Thanks for bringing this up on the forums.

We added the contextmenu event to HTML on event puzzle. It allows you to override or remove the standard right-click menu (so it’s desktops only). It is possible to show the context menu over the entire screen or only over a specific object.

We added a new puzzle group to the library (named “Context Menu”) so that you can add a custom right-click menu to your app quickly.

We added a new property – pointerId – to the puzzle get event property. It is required for processing multi-touch event user interfaces.

The puzzles when clicked, when hovered, and when dragged now support using get event property puzzle inside them. For example, it can be used to receive the mouse coordinates inside these puzzles.

Other improvements

We added an API method WebGLRenderer.readRenderTargetPixelsAsync() which particularly helps to speed up the work of the third-party Gaussian Splatting plugin. Thanks for suggesting this on the forums.

There were further security-related updates in the WordPress plugin.

The App Manager got various UI tweaks, mostly relevant to the Safari browser under macOS.

Bugs

We fixed the issue with incorrect links/snippets copied to clipboard when uploading multiple items to Verge3D Network. Thanks for reporting this issue on the forums.