Verge3D 2.14 pre1 & pre2 available!

Augmented Reality in the Browser

You can make your web apps AR-capable thanks to tireless WebXR working group now stabilizing the specification. The AR feature which can be enabled in the recently released Chrome 76 for Android.

Read more about AR and how to enable it from this blog article.

In addition to the demo described in the blog post, we implemented an AR mode switch in our Industrial robot demo in addition to VR (both Max and Blender versions). Due to the natural size of the robot, AR works best in big rooms with visible floor corners.

VR Updates

To reflect recent changes in the WebXR specification, we renamed the init VR mode puzzle to check VR mode, as it is now not necessary to initialize the VR mode before trying to enter it.

Also the enter VR mode puzzle received new options: room (for bounded environments such as rooms or exhibition booths), looking around (previously called looking from origin), and viewer locked (all objects are parented to VR headset space).

Texture From Text

Thanks to this awesome puzzle, you can now create textures from text on the fly and use them in your 3D scene. Imagine personalized products, gifts, 3D/VR interfaces and other endless opportunities offered by this feature!

A custom font can be easily added to an application for use with that puzzle (or with HTML puzzles) by loading it from file (or URL) on the init stage.

We plan enabling more operations with textures including blurring and generating normal maps.

Blender-Max Version Sync

The Blender version additionally received the features included in Verge3D 2.13 for 3ds Max released 3 weeks after the Blender counterpart (actually, one feature was removed, see below).

We changed class to className in the get attr puzzle’s dropdown as this is a correct JavaScript property name.

Some properties for handling HTML5 audio and video elements were added to the set/get attr puzzles: loop, muted, duration, ended, paused and volume. Also we added the ended event in the HTML event puzzle.

Debug puzzles category is now called System. It now includes the feature available puzzle which was moved from Misc. In the System category you will also find new puzzles – set screen scale and native screen scale – which you can use to properly handle Retina displays and to tweak rendering quality and performance of your WebGL apps.

The example above increases the WebGL canvas’ resolution on desktops (Retina or not), so that the resulting rendering becomes much sharper.

There is a new puzzle called system date/time which you can use for adding clocks, calendars, organizers etc features to your apps.

New Dictionary puzzles are available. One of them, get keys, will be useful for retrieving and iterating through all keys in a dictionary.

The puzzle check key examines if some key is present in a dictionary.

The last puzzle, is empty, checks if a specified dictionary contains no data.

You will also notice the absence of the Facebook GLB export option as this feature is no longer offered by Facebook.

Other Things

We fixed a rather serious issue in Blender version related to shape keys, so they are now exported when a mesh have the Normals > Auto Smooth option enabled or when it contains polygons with number of vertices more than 4 (pentagons, hexagons, etc). This fix opens the road to implementing proper support for controlling shape keys within Puzzles – hello parametric objects!

A puzzle for setting the direction of objects is available (in addition to the previously implemented getter counterpart). You can use it for orienting objects towards view direction, for example.

The HTML element representing the default rotating preloader received an id – v3d_preloader_container – so you can now customize the preloader with CSS.

Try it out!

As usual, you can get the preview build from the downloads page. We are eager to hear how AR and the other features work for you!

Aug, 9 – Preview 2 build available!
As promised, we deliver the Max version of the AR demo – check out the source files in the pre2 build!

Also in this update we allowed the SSR and simple refraction puzzles to accept lists of materials, not just single materials.