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@core3d, I have seen the same behavior with instances coming from 3dsMax. From Max, it seems that Verge3D exports each instance as a unique piece of geometry. This behavior makes the .bin file bigger and can bog down the client.

On the other hand, when I instance geometry in Blender, the instances all share one geometry buffer. I have attached a screenshot of 100 Suzanne instances created in Blender. They all share the same mesh in Blender. You can see that there are only three geometry buffers in Verge3D (the camera and light are the other two objects).

I don’t have an answer for you. I assumed that I was making a mistake with my model in 3dsMax. I, too, would like to know how to get Verge3D to get object instances in 3dsMax to share geometry buffers.

@GlifTek, thank you for the great feedback.
There is a reason that I load the scene with a low-res JPG texture. If I start the scene with a 2K JPEG and then do the sniff-and-swap for WebP, the scene ends up loading two 2K texture maps on Chrome. On Chrome, the scene first loads the 2K JPEG and then loads the 2K WebP. I don’t think that there is a way to prevent the Verge3D engine from loading the initial texture. The initial texture is specified in the .gltf file. I was concerned about the load time. For a single texture on a single object, this time penalty is probably irrelevant. If we had to do this sniff-and-swap on many objects, the time penalty perhaps justifies using a low-res starting texture, but we would need to benchmark this scenario to determine the best strategy. Thanks again.

I like webp, but I think that platform support is an issue right now. Specifically, Apple does not support it and Blender does not support it.

If I can ignore the issue with Blender and just focus on the browser, the image codecs are not part of Verge3D. The browser vendors supply the png, jpeg, and webp codecs. Apple is planning to include the webp codec in the next major OS update (making Apple 10 years late to the webp party).

Maybe we could use the feature detection puzzle in Verge3D to detect if we are in Safari-land and serve up jpg textures when needed and webp when not? It would be an interesting experiment.

I could see webp being useful for the high-detail base-color texture maps.

@alfred, Mikhail is correct with regards to retopology. You will achieve the best results with retopo, but I realize that sometimes you just want to clean up a CAD model in Blender.

All CAD models are different, but if your imported CAD model has surfaces demarcated with sharp edges in Blender, you are in luck. Blender renders sharp edges in light blue in Blender. You can use sharp edges as boundaries on surface selection. I suggest that you select all of the surfaces that you wish to keep using “select linked” with the “sharp” option. Invert the selection (ctrl-i) and deleted the unwanted faces.

I made a quick recording of this technique in action. In the video, I want to keep the outside of the molded box. I want to delete all of the interior features. This took the number of vertices from 29,000 to 488 in a few seconds.

Maybe this technique could work for your model?

@illussimo, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Apple to ship WebGL 2.0. Apple could have done this years ago, but choose not to do it. Apple has a history of poor support for open standard APIs. They have deprecated OpenGL and OpenCL on the desktop. They don’t support Vulkan. Apple has its own 3D low-level API called Metal. Based on what I have read, it seems that Apple wants to jump to WebGPU for 3D on the web. I would be happy to be wrong.

ya. I am not a coder by training, but learning to use git and VSCode to manage Verge3D projects was a revelation to me. In addition to making updating the framework easier, it makes collaboration with my colleagues easier and changes safer. I can always fall back to a previous commit if I goof something up. This is just my opinion, but I think that using tools like these are essential to being a productive 3D implementer. A hat tip to @gary for making the original suggestion to use these tools.

@GlifTek, I have several projects that are old enough that the changes to the html/css/js files have had a significant impact when updated. My situation might be unusual because I often tinker with these files. Merging these changes used to be a difficult task because I was not using a good version control system. Since then, I have switched to git/gitLFS/VSCode/GitLab for my projects and this has made a world of difference. I can usually update, diff, and merge a project in about a minute. Some updates to Verge3D do make breaking changes, such as the preloader that Yuri mentions, but these are rare. Also, using VSCode and diff makes such breaking changes very apparent to me so that I can fix them quickly.

In addition to the preloader, I can recall that the name of the HTML container has changed, and the method that your JS code calls puzzles has changed.