Verge3D 3.9 pre1 available!

E-learning and SCORM

Although Verge3D has been used for creating educational content since the beginning, it lacked specialized functionality required by the e-learning industry. It changes today as we roll out the integration module that embraces the SCORM standard. This is the technology through which web-based content is supplied to most training applications – also known as learning management systems (LMS).

As a result, you can now convert your interactive 3D web application for use with any LMS by simply clicking a button in the App Manager! It will automatically create all the XML manifests according to the SCORM 1.2 specification and pack everything in a single zipped package ready for deployment.

To make the LMS record the course progress, one would use the SCORM programming interface. As you can guess, where is no need to write any code with Verge3D, as we have puzzles for that! These puzzles are installed as a E-Learning plugin, similar to E-Commerce puzzles. Using them you can initialize a lesson, reward the student with scores, set statuses (passed, failed or incomplete), and even create multi-page courses that may load different scenes for each lesson stage.

For more info on creating 3D web learning courses please refer to this doc page. See also the sources of our old E-learning demo that was upgraded for use with LMS.

URL Shortener for Verge3D Network

What if after uploading to Verge3D Network you would obtain something like

https://v3d.net/18

instead of

https://cdn.soft8soft.com/AROAJSY2GOEHMOFUVPIOE:57c39c157b/applications/my_awesome_app/my_awesome_app.html

Sounds good? You got it!

All apps newly uploaded to Verge3D Network will automatically obtain a nice short URL. You can use v3d.net to make compact links for those of your apps that are already deployed on Verge3D Network.

Actually, you can shorten any other web addresses with it. You are free to choose how your URL will look exactly, or just let it generate some link for you automatically. Enjoy!

Virtual Reality

Here comes a series of improvements that we made for the existing WebXR implementation in Verge3D.

First of all, we have enabled anti-aliasing (MSAA) for all VR scenes which will surely boost the rendering quality!

Next, Verge3D no longer reduces the resolution artificially when working on Daydream or cardboards which will result in much sharper imagery produced by these devices. Speaking of cardboards, we have removed the support of such headsets that worked (quite poorly) via the Legacy VR option. Cardboard devices now only work on Android via Google VR Services.

We fixed the issue with shadows from directional lights that were missing in VR mode.

And finally, we have greatly improved the VR experience for our Industrial Robot demo (Blender, 3ds Max, Maya). Particularly, we made the UI more responsive, and optimized the performance specifically for the VR mode.

Ambient Occlusion

The real-time ambient occlusion feature introduced in the previous release was further upgraded in a series of improvements.

The first of them is that the AO effect is now applied in the main render pass. As a result, anti-aliasing now correctly applies for this effect which helped remove some artifacts. Moreover, ambient occlusion is now properly mixed with BSDF materials (see comparison on the screenshot). Also alpha clip materials can now be used with ambient occlusion.

The next upgrade relates to specular reflections which the AO now affects (besides the diffuse component). This technique is known by the name Ground Truth-based Specular Occlusion (GTSO), and it now helps to further improve the realism of your Verge3D scenes.

Then, the Bent Normals option is now supported (enabled in Blender by default). This means a proper support for normal mapping and improved consistency with Blender viewport.

Finally, we addressed this Android-specific issue and made it possible to use ambient occlusion when the camera is switched.

Performance Tweaks

We introduced some new features with the Puzzles to give you more control over the performance of your Verge3D apps.

The puzzle remove post effects has obtained a switch to remove effects either added with post-processing puzzles, or those enabled in the 3D editor (that is, outline and ambient occlusion).

The puzzle set light param now has 3 options to tweak the shadows: use shadow, shadow map size, and shadow map filtering. You can play with these options to trade the quality for performance or vice versa.

Finally, we added another entry to the Puzzles library called performance tweaks. This group of puzzles basically increases the resolution for powerful devices or removes all post-effects and shadows for poor ones. Simply drag it out to the puzzles of your app to make it adaptive to user hardware. We ourselves have added this to our most graphics intensive demos.

Puzzles

We overhauled the puzzle texture from text. In fact it is a completely new puzzle based on the Canvas-Txt library that only retained the name (yet the old puzzle will continue to work). This upgraded puzzle brings many important improvements: multi-line support, better justification, and the box parameters to flexibly position your text on the texture.

A new puzzle called set camera param is available. You can use it to adjust the camera by changing its FOV, speeds, limits, etc on the fly.

We added the beforeunload option to the dropdown of the event puzzle. This event is fired when the page closes. It may come in handy for finishing communication with a learning management system.

The puzzle get URL data now properly works with special symbols.

Blender-specific

We fixed a bug with unsupported emission in Blender 2.91-2.93.

3ds Max-specific

We managed to improve the quality of ORM textures used in gltf-compatible materials by employing adaptive image scaling (that is, selecting the closest power-of-two size).
Also the images for ORM textures are now processed much faster. This was achieved by using the native 3ds Max API instead of the ImageMagick tool. The new approach has reduced the file size of the Verge3D distribution noticeably.

Maya-specific

We managed to improve the quality of ORM textures used in gltf-compatible materials by employing adaptive image scaling (that is, selecting the closest power-of-two size).

You can now use the Normalize setting for Area lights.

We fixed the bug with Influence Distance (a parameter of the reflection plane) which was not correctly interpreted in Maya viewport.

Other improvements

We fixed a bug with dynamic loading when the 3D UI-related setting HiDPI Compositing is used. Thanks for reporting this!

We documented the JavaScript API for constraints.