Verge3D 4.3 pre3 available!

New Virtual Reality Demo

Previous Verge3D 4.3 preview builds introduced some tools to simplify the creation of highly interactive VR apps. We employed these features to create a new VR demo. It is different from our other example app Snowballs VR in that it contains much less game logic, and does not use any true physics for collisions. This makes it much easier to learn from and reuse in your projects.

The demo shows off the following crucial features:

• walking around in virtual space using a pre-modeled collision mesh
• grabbing and throwing things (fruits) with both hands
• interacting with things (home appliances and drink)
• playing back audio effects attached to user actions

Try it for yourself by opening this link in your Oculus or HTC Vive browser:
https://v3d.net/vrdemo

…or watch a screencast video:

The sources for this demo can be downloaded from the Assets Store (currently Blender only, working on 3ds Max and Maya version now).

Depth Prepass Transparency (Blender-only)

We supported the combination of Blender’s shader settings which enables an alternative mode for rendering transparent surfaces. If you select Alpha Blend for your material, and disable Show Backface at the same time, the object will be rendered by using the special technique called “Depth Prepass” which renders only one (nearest to the viewer) transparency layer.

Depth Prepass allows for rendering of transparent objects of any complexity by drawing only the nearest surface, which completely eliminates any transparency artifacts.

This mode can also be activated with code:
material.depthPrepass = true;

Also, when Show Backface is turned on, the checkbox Backface Culling now produces exactly the same rendering that you see in Blender Eevee.

Overall, as a result of all these improvements, transparent objects will now be rendered much more consistently with Blender viewport.

NPM Package

We published both an ES6-modules-based and a conventional builds of Verge3D in the npm repository. This package also includes a script to activate the license, and a simple example application written with just 5 lines of JavaScript code (way shorter than Three.js!).

Having Verge3D ready from npm will surely make the life of web 3D devs easier as you can now install, upgrade and integrate the engine with your JavaScript projects within a familiar environment. See the Developer Reference in your local documentation for more info (will be published online when v.4.3. is finally out).

Other Improvements

By default, Verge3D supports the most commonly used PC and Mac architectures. Starting from this version, Enterprise customers are able to port Verge3D to other platforms such as Raspberry PI, Loongson, RISC-V, etc.

Verge3D now supports Blender 3.6 which is in alpha status at the moment.

We updated the Code-Based template which now uses the default Verge3D cube. We also simplified its JS code a bit.

Bug Fixes

We fixed the bug with using local variables in the puzzle exec script. Thanks for reporting this on the forums.

We fixed the bug with node groups occurred in Blender 3.3+ reported on the forums here and here.

We fixed potential freezes of the App Manager when running lots of operations at the same time.

Documentation

We reworked the API reference which now includes a whole bunch of new programming guides. Particularly, we added or rewritten sections Programming Basics, Using Node.js and NPM, Verge3D Life Cycle, and Developer Kit.

The Chinese documentation was seriously reworked and upgraded.

We started using WebP format for images in the User Manual. This should make the docs load faster and improve image quality.