Verge3D 4.5 pre1 available!

Puzzles

Here we introduce a new drag move puzzle–the old one is deprecated but still works. This new puzzle obtained an option called space which you can switch to world, parent, or local for much greater flexibility.

For further explanations, see the video by Xeon’s 3D Lab below.

The recently introduced close app puzzle learned to work inside iframes. Thanks for bringing this up on the forums.

Blender-specific

We reworked the exporter add-on to use optimized data buffers provided by the NumPy library for huge performance gains. As a result, scenes containing a lot of geometry or animations can be exported/previewed up to 10 times faster! In addition, the exporter now uses much less memory.

We made all the Sheen settings of the Principled BSDF node fully consistent with Blender viewport, and render faster. Please note that these settings work a bit differently in the upcoming Blender 4.0–the new behavior, however, is also supported by Verge3D.

Verge3D can now handle the Sheen BSDF node which is new in Blender 4.0. It is supposed to be used in Cycles yet it will work as Diffuse BSDF in Eevee and Verge3D.

We slightly optimized the shader generated by the Diffuse BSDF node.

We fixed export crashes in Blender 4.0 Alpha. Please note that this Blender version won’t work with Verge3D 4.4 anymore due to significant changes in materials in Alpha daily updates. So you should use this Verge3D preview, or better stick to the stable Blender 3.6 for the time being.

3ds Max-specific

A new demo called Swiss Army Knife is available which we intend to use for educational purposes. A new tutorial series for Verge3D beginners is on the way!

You can now use all params from the Lightness/Advanced settings of the Color Correction map. As a result, all settings are now supported for this map.

More improvements

From now on, when running the App Manager for the first time, you can specify an empty folder for your applications. This will automatically create an applications folder inside the installation directory. This allows you to create portable Verge3D installs (e.g. on a flash drive).

Fit to Camera Edge / Fit Offset parameter now works properly for objects with zero size (such as Empty / Dummy), or when the Shape setting is set to Point.

ESM shadows now render faster thanks to some optimizations in their shader code. The Global Illumination demo which uses ESM shadows thus noticeably benefited.

We made various cleanups in the engine code. Particularly we removed the legacy EquiCube class. We also refactored and optimized the GraphUtils module used by the engine to parse and process material node trees.

We continued removing legacy Python 2 code from exporter script (there is still some old code left).

Finally, we updated docs on transparency.