Verge3D 2.17 for Blender Released

We are happy to finalize this year efforts by another release! The 2.17 update brings many Blender integration improvements including the possibility to create anisotropic materials, a Windows installer, range sliders for post-effects with real-time preview, CSS colors support in Puzzles, various WebXR/VR updates, and the QR code generator for publishing. Besides, a new long-awaited demo has been completed by this date and included in this release. Enjoy!

Jewelry Configurator

Seeing much interest from jewelers, we decided to create a new application to demonstrate how Verge3D can help this industry. This demo shows off the latest development advancements and has the following features:

• 11 ring designs loaded at user request, coming with 5 shapes each
• 5 ring curvatures
• selection of 3 metals, 7 gems, and 4 pearls
• switch between single and multiple gems
• text engraving based on user input with 5 different fonts
• bloom effect and real-time refraction for the gem material
• hand-made HTML UI scripted with Puzzles (no JavaScript used)
• mobile layout
• 6x-8x compression for all assets for quick loading

Many thousands of possible combinations and custom engraving ensure that the client will obtain a unique ring. You can try out this configurator yourself by following this link or clicking on the image below.

Learn how this app was made by checking out the source files included in the Verge3D distribution.

Blender Integration

The Tangent output of the Geometry node is now supported which you can use for creating anisotropic effects.

Blender 2.81’s Voronoi, Bump, Clamp and Map Range nodes are now supported.

The exporter will now use simple placeholders with the following shader nodes: Ambient Occlusion, Bevel, Object Info, Hair Info, Particle Info, Vertex Color, Volume Info, Principled Volume, IES Texture, Musgrave Texture, and White Noise Texture.

The Windows version of Verge3D for Blender is now distributed with an installation wizard. Therefore, configuring script path manually is no longer required. You still need to activate the Verge3D add-on in Blender preferences.

After installing, you can launch the standalone App Manager (i.e. without running Blender first) using a desktop icon or from Windows’ Start menu.

We implemented the Depth Test option. Disable it to make an object render above all other objects (you also need to set the rendering order setting to some positive value).

We fixed mesh tangents not exported from Blender 2.79 in some cases.

MacOS and Linux distributions of Verge3D are now compressed with LZMA rather than ZIP making the archives significantly more compact.

There were also several minor stability improvements with regard to the newest Blender 2.81.

We fixed crashing of the addon related to exporting glTF-compliant shaders.

Puzzles

Post-processing puzzles are now equipped with range sliders for faster tweaking. Moreover, parameter changes can now be previewed in real-time, making the adjustment of post-process effects a much easier job.

It is now possible to use CSS codes to set material color, including hexadecimal codes, RGB/HSL values and color names.

The event property puzzle now provides the target.value option. With it, you can retrieve values from <input> elements which the user interacts with.

Particularly, you can obtain CSS color code from a color picker implemented as a color-typed <input> element and paint an object.

You can now dynamically change CSS properties located inside a @media block typically used to create different layouts for various desktop and mobile screen resolutions. This is possible thanks to an optional slot added to the set CSS rule puzzle.

The simple refraction and the screen space reflection/refraction puzzles are now easier to use thanks to material dropdown added to them.

The puzzle replace texture now properly works with dynamically loaded shared materials.

The puzzle set timer now have the repeat option.

The puzzle get URL params now have the in parent doc option.

The Puzzles editor now properly works with application with no visual_logic.xml file.

The last but not least, we performed a major refactoring of the Puzzles code making it cleaner and easier to maintain and extend with new features. We also updated Puzzles for the latest version of Google Blockly to take advantage of various usability and performance improvements as well as bug fixes introduced in the upstream.

WebXR

All WebXR origin trials were removed from applications and templates, as the VR component of WebXR API is now enabled in the stable Chrome 79 by default.

We supported cardboard-based VR in iOS 13. VR on iOS now requires user action to launch, so we added an dialog message to facilitate this requirement.

Other Improvements

Fixed speculars rendered incorrectly by some older Mali GPUs (e.g. found on Samsung Galaxy S6).

The App Manager will no longer be suggesting to update to unstable preview builds.

WordPress plugin now supports international characters in WooCommerce product attributes.

We got rid of those annoying “fakepath” warnings thrown by WebGL’s shader compilator in the browser console on Windows.

The engine now properly works in Chrome’s headless mode, which makes it possible to render 3D graphics on the server side.

Picking/raycasting no longer selects objects scaled down to zero dimensions.

We fixed the issue with Flying camera which did not allow to scroll the page if zooming is disabled.

We fixed an issue occurred on some Android devices with double-sided materials which were not correctly lit.

QR codes are now generated for Verge3D Network uploads (the green button).

The User Manual now utilizes fonts that are consistent with the website’s. There were some other stylings as well.

Try it out!

As usual, grab the new version from this page. Let us know how it works for you on the forums!