Verge3D 4.11 pre1 available!

Outlining the Future

Before we go into details, we’d like to outline our intentions for the future. We see our tool as a professional enterprise-grade product with a stable and fully-usable feature set, and this release represents an important shift in Verge3D development. Here is what we intend to do to achieve this long-term goal:

• limit the number of supported versions of modeling tools to focus on product quality
• remove features inherited from Three.js which do not fit the Verge3D paradigm and thus avoid bloat
• prioritize improving the existing features over adding new fancy but barely useful or buggy stuff
• ensure that all demos can be opened in all supported versions of the compatible 3D modeling tools
• implement extensive automated testing of Verge3D releases, demos and assets packs
• maintain up-to-date documentation highlighting most efficient production techniques

Let us know what you think in the comments. Meanwhile, see what we have done for now.

New E-commerce Demo: Battery Shop

We used to have a simplistic demo with soda cans to show off how the e-commerce puzzles work, but now you can enjoy a full-scale application bundled in all three Verge3D flavors.

As a reminder, Verge3D’s e-commerce puzzles work in the WordPress environment on top of the free WooCommerce plugin. However the principles behind this app’s procedurally generated content can be used in any applications beyond the WordPress CMS.

This shop showcases adding an interactive 3D rendering to the simple product, the grouped product, and the variable (configurable) product as defined by WooCommerce.

Our Battery Shop can render everything between a single item and a big pack with hundreds of items, making it suitable for retail and wholesale alike.

Blender-Specific Features

This update breaks the compatibility for older Blender versions in the range from v.3.4 to v.4.1, so Blender 4.2 LTS is the minimally supported version now. Dropping these 5 outdated versions allowed us to remove a lot of legacy code both from the exporter and the engine – to say nothing of the streamlined asset creation pipeline.

Also, v.4.2 and later are all based on Eevee Next which significantly changed the things when it was first introduced. So the workflow should now be more consistent across Blender versions, while simplifying the installation procedure at the same time. All applications created in the App Manager are now based on the template .blend file saved in Blender 4.2.

But Blender continues to evolve rapidly, so we made sure that Verge3D 4.11 is compatible with Blender 5.0 which is currently at alpha stage.

The Blender panel for exporting collections obtained icons and now filters by name correctly.

We corrected clamping in the node Map Range – thanks for reporting this on the forums!

Finally, we fixed the issue with Depth Write which must not be available for opaque materials, only for transparent ones.

3ds Max-Specific Features

When the Gradient map is added to a material, it used to create the redundant file named converted_map.png in the app folder – not anymore.

We fixed the crash in the Backburner / CoreFinder render management systems which conflicted with the Verge3D menu. Thanks for reporting this on the forums.

Maya-Specific Features

The following project files and folders are now ignored by the App Manager when uploading an app to the Verge3D Network: .mayaSwatches, .mat, .mel, and .tx.

Puzzles

The puzzle set camera param obtained new setting, screen space panning, which you can set to false to enable navigation like in Google Earth or in bird’s-eye view video games.

The workings of such the type of camera controls can be seen in the impressive Gaussian splatting demo by Verge3D user nicknamed vv4d (navigate with right mouse button pressed).

The puzzle make object from (which recently got a major update) now supports boolean operations on both morphed and skinned objects. This feature was suggested through the Enterprise support channel by two users independently of each other! Also, this puzzle now correctly works with parented objects.

Feature Deprecation and Cleanup

For this update we performed cleanup of deprecated JavaScript APIs which we warned about a few releases ago. List of removed classes and properties: AmbientLightProbe, MeshPhysicalMaterial, MeshLambertMaterial.specularMap, MeshBasicMaterial.specularMap, HemisphereLight, HemisphereLightHelper, HemisphereLightProbe, StereoCamera, DodecahedronGeometry, OctahedronGeometry, TetrahedronGeometry, TorusKnotGeometry, BufferGeometryUtils.computeMikkTSpaceTangents, and BufferGeometry.geometry.morphAttributes.color.

We’re now zeroing in on a new bunch of features inherited from Three.js long ago which we consider obsolete for the Verge3D pipeline. We already removed them from the Developer Reference. If there will be no special request regarding these features from Verge3D users, they might be removed altogether in the future.

Here the classes, methods, and properties that are deprecated with this update: AnimationObjectGroup, AnimationClip.parse(), BooleanKeyframeTrack, ColorKeyframeTrack, StringKeyframeTrack, AudioAnalyser, ArcCurve, CatmullRomCurve3, CubicBezierCurve3, LineCurve3, QuadraticBezierCurve3, InstancedBufferAttribute, InstancedBufferGeometry, CubeTextureLoader, MeshLambertMaterial, Material.alphaMap, Material.combine, Material.displacementBias, Material.displacementMap, Material.displacementScale, Material.lightMap, Material.lightMapIntensity, Material.normalMapType (drop v3d.ObjectSpaceNormalMap), Material.reflectivity, Material.refractionRatio, Cylindrical, Vector3.setFromCylindrical, InstancedMesh, LOD, CSS3DSprite, CompressedArrayTexture, Texture.mapping, CubeRefractionMapping, EquirectangularReflectionMapping, EquirectangularRefractionMapping, Texture.matrixAutoUpdate, Texture.matrix, Texture.offset, Texture.repeat, Texture.rotation, Texture.center, and Texture.updateMatrix().

We also performed a massive cleanup of deprecated shaders inherited from older version of the modeling tools that are no longer supported.

More Features

Verge3D now checks mutual compatibility of the engine runtime and the glTF scene, and warns about possible issues to the browser console. If you happen to see such the message you are encouraged to do what it suggests.

The Electron.js framework used to create desktop applications was updated to v37.2.3. We also updated the templates and documentation to make them relevant to this new version. Among new features are improved performance, security, and support for modern Web APIs. Note that Windows 7 is no longer supported, so the minimal OS version now is Window 10.

When extracting the distribution archive under Linux or ChromeOS it no longer prints lots of warnings like “Ignoring unknown extended header keyword LIBARCHIVE.xattr.com.apple.quarantine”.

We got rid of duplicate shader compilation when a reflection plane is present in the scene. In certain corner cases this speeds up loading time considerably.

The puzzle product attribute now no longer returns undefined value if such the attribute does not exist for the product. Instead it return the empty string.

Handled Bugs

We fixed the crash in the App Manager which could happen if the v3d.js engine module was corrupted. From now on, it silently skips such apps and prints a warning in the log.

We fixed the problem with the Verge3D WordPress plugin which failed to activate should the Editor user role be missing in one’s WordPress system for some reason. This issue was reported through the Enterprise support channel.

Also in WordPress plugin – we fixed the problem with uploading folders containing hidden files (relevant to macOS and Linux), as well as with uploading Maya’s .tx files.

Documentation

We moved the Verge3D Life Cycle chapter from the Developer Reference to the User Manual and updated it too.

We improved the chapter on using the Development Kit. Particularly we explained how you can disable Verge3D version line printed in the browser console.

In the Maya’s Materials chapter we described how to use vertex colors.

In the WordPress guide we added info about fixing the reloading of the product page in the e-commerce store.

Most importantly, we invested huge efforts to overhaul the API Reference. It now focuses on features that are actually supported and – in our opinion – useful to Verge3D users. We reworked the code examples to make them work in the standard Verge3D templates, added more explanations for them, provided links to corresponding puzzles, and improved their readability thanks to an upgraded layout and a new monospaced font.