Verge3D 2.16 pre2 available!

Better Ambient Occlusion

New ambient occlusion algorithm which provides better quality and performance is available in the form of a new puzzle. The old SSAO puzzle is deprecated but will continue to work.

Puzzles

The button for pausing and resuming the rendering is now available in the Puzzles editor. It may help, particularly, when you’re scripting heavy scenes. Also you may use the Ctrl-S shortcut for the Save operation.

The download file puzzle was implemented. You can use this puzzle, for example, to save previously taken screenshots, or to save some information in a text file.

User-created entries in the Puzzles Library can now be easily restored after engine update as they are now stored in the dedicated file called puzzles/my_library.xml. Simply copy this file to the new Verge3D installation folder.

Physics puzzles now support multi-material objects. We have also updated the physics demo both for Blender and Max versions.

Blender-Specific Features

The material panel now has a checkbox for making a material strictly compatible with the glTF 2.0 standard (i.e. without Soft8Soft extensions). For now, only materials with the Principled BSDF node can be converted to become glTF-compliant.

Such shaders are simpler and faster compared to EEVEE-based materials, yet provide decent quality. The node group called Verge3D PBR previously used for creating glTF-compliant materials is now deprecated but will continue to work. The documentation page was updated to reflect the above-mentioned changes.

Also, the upcoming Blender 2.81’s Noise Texture node is now supported.

Compatibility Across Platforms

We made Verge3D work on older iOS devices such as iPad of 2 and 3 generations, iPad mini 1st gen, iPhone 4s, as well as on older Android devices with Mali (Samsung S6 etc) and Qualcomm Snapdragon (Samsung S5 etc) GPUs.

Verge3D now prints a warning to the browser console if the number of textures per shader exceeds the harsh iOS limit of 8. Also we now force using WebGL 1.0 on iOS, as WebGL 2.0 on this platform is still in development.

Other Improvements

We removed odd Python cache files from the distribution (that was several hundreds of useless files stored in __pycache__ folders).

Bug Fixes

We fixed the issue with touch move events (particularly, provided by HTML Puzzles) not working due to a conflict with the default touchscreen controls.

Now scenes without any geometry won’t crash the engine.

We also fixed the crash when screen-space reflection/refraction is enabled for glTF-compliant materials.

Finally, post-process effects are now restored upon exiting the AR or VR modes.