Verge3D 3.3 pre1 available!

Loading Time

For this release we addressed user concerns regarding the loading speed of their applications. As such, we performed a series of optimizations for shader compilation, which is often the bottleneck for loading.

Particularly, we optimized the shader that represents the environment lighting, as well as the shaders that relate to real-time shadows.

As a result, we managed to speed up the compilation stage by 100% for scenes with many shaders (such as Scooter etc).

These optimizations also improved the performance on low-end hardware a bit.

Canvas Textures

The HTML canvas can now be used as material texture. A <canvas> element can be created using the newly introduced HTML puzzle create canvas elem, and assigned as material texture as usual, i.e. with the replace texture puzzle.

Once created, the canvas becomes available for drawing on it via JavaScript. You can update the canvas inside the runCode() function of your_app_name.js module. To do this, retrieve the canvas texture by its ID specified in the puzzle:

    var canvasTex = v3d.puzzles.canvasTextures['my_canvas'];

After that, you can access the HTML canvas element as follows:

    var canvas = canvasTex.image;

You can use the standard methods available for drawing on the HTML canvas. For example, the following listing draws a blue smiling face on white background:

    var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");

    ctx.fillStyle = 'white';
    ctx.strokeStyle = 'blue';

    ctx.fillRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);

    ctx.beginPath();
    ctx.arc(75, 75, 50, 0, Math.PI * 2, true); // Outer circle
    ctx.moveTo(110, 75);
    ctx.arc(75, 75, 35, 0, Math.PI, false);  // Mouth (clockwise)
    ctx.moveTo(65, 65);
    ctx.arc(60, 65, 5, 0, Math.PI * 2, true);  // Left eye
    ctx.moveTo(95, 65);
    ctx.arc(90, 65, 5, 0, Math.PI * 2, true);  // Right eye
    ctx.stroke(); 

Finally, if you’d like the updates to become immediately visible in the 3D rendering, you should mark the canvas texture as dynamic:

    canvasTex.needsUpdate = true;

Blender-specific

We reviewed all Eevee nodes with the purpose of updating the documentation, and fixed some issues discovered in the process:

• Fixed minor shading issues with Glass BSDF node.
• Hue/Saturation node now properly works with settings > 1 or < 0.
• Non-uniform scale is now supported for the Mapping node.
• Clamp node now works properly when Min value exceeds the Max value.

Max-specific

Some settings of the Matte/Shadow material requested on the forums were implemented in Verge3D.

Maya-specific

We supported colorComposite and floatComposite nodes for this update. These nodes can be used to mix the occlusion map in materials.

We also added Verge3D’s Anisotropic Filtering setting for textures.

Other improvements

The JavaScript method Geometry.fromBufferGeometry() now properly works with vertex colors.

The puzzle get object transform now have an option to retrieve all 3 coordinates as a list.

This option can be useful for providing its output directly to Vector puzzles.

We fixed the flipping issue with the create environment puzzle reported on the forums.