Yuri Kovelenov

Multi-Material Objects and Shared Materials

Verge3D users sometimes face two major sources of issues when creating advanced configurators. One is multi-material objects and the other is when a same material is shared by different objects. With this update, we addressed both those problems by adding two new options to the relevant material puzzles.

First option first: the puzzle assign material used to work with the very first material of a multi-material object. From now on, you can access/replace the required material by its index as authored in the 3D modeling software by enabling multi-material index for the puzzle.

In the following simplistic example, the cube’s 2 materials are named “first” and “second”. Now you have the power to replace either of it by the “third” material – something that was not possible with Puzzles before.

What about the second case? The material puzzles used to work on a material name, which is always the same for similar-named and/or shared materials. So if you update such a material with a puzzle, it will update all objects that bear it. Yet sometimes you may want to pick a single material assigned to a concrete object, rather than to do them all.

This can now be achieved thanks to that second option – return unique material id. When enabled, the puzzle material from would return a unique material identifier instead of its name thus enabling a finer control. You can then use this ID (which looks like 5c464bf0-043a-40ee-b864-5c026436d7de) to pass it into other material puzzles.

Here is how it works – all 3 cubes share a same shiny material, but you can still vary its inputs independently for each object:

Handling the Clones

When cloning objects, the newly created copies used to inherit a same material shared by all the clones. At the same time, if the original object happens to belong to a group (called collection in Blender, group | selection set in 3ds Max, group | set in Maya), the clone does NOT inherit it – in other words, the group selector puzzle won’t work for the copies.

To provide you with more control, we made it possible to change the said behavior by using two new options added to the clone object puzzle: also clone materials and preserve object groups. If enabled, the first one allows you to update the material of an individual clone. The second option simply adds the clones into the same group as the original object.

On the above screenshot, 10 randomly positioned copies are created in the same group, with their materials copied too. This allows you to individually set the color for any clone clicked by the user.

On the other note, we also fixed an old problem with colors shared between cloned materials.

Shared Textures

Here is the final use-case in the sharing series – you can now replace a texture individually for every object even if it is shared by many. For that we added the self-explanatory option, prevent texture sharing, to the respective puzzle:

In the above-pictured example, all 3 cubes share the same texture yet it’s still possible to independently apply a new image to a required object.

All upgraded puzzles are fully backward compatible, so the old behavior is preserved and you don’t need to fix anything in your existing puzzles.

Lines

When a line is created using the draw line from obj puzzle, it is now automatically assigned a distinct name. For example, if the object’s name is “Cube”, then the line drawn from it will be named “CubeLine”. You can then put this name into other puzzles, e.g. to change the line color (see below).

In other news, this very puzzle now correctly works if the 3D canvas is offset on the page – particularly, in the viewport of the Puzzles Editor.

Finally, you can now change the color of lines (either of wireframe-rendered meshes or created using the draw line puzzle) via the set color in material puzzle. See the above example where the line color is accessed by the “magic” color property.

Blender Integration

With this update we introduce a preliminary support for the upcoming Blender 4.4. The main feature of new Blender is a system of action slots. Basically, an action can now contain animations from different Blender data-blocks, e.g. object movement and shape key animation bundled in a single action.

We dropped the official support for Blender 3.0-3.3 which are 4 years old. The minimally supported Blender version is now 3.4 released in the end of 2022. This version is included in ChromeOS repository so we decided to keep it for a while.

3ds Max Integration

With this update we introduce a preliminary support for upcoming 3ds Max 2026, which uses a new map called OpenPBR Material by default (first appeared in 3ds Max 2025.3).
We also drop official support for 3ds Max 2022 released 4 years ago.

Maya Integration

With this update we introduce a preliminary support for upcoming Maya 2026, which uses a new shader node called OpenPBR Surface by default (first appeared in Maya 2025.3).
We also drop official support for Maya 2022 released 4 years ago.

Other Improvements

Service Tools menu is used to show up using ~~~ triple tilde keys, but this works only on the QWERTY keyboard. The menu can now be invoked on various national keyboard layouts too, such as AZERTY (widespread in France and Belgium), and other (Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/Japanese/…) keyboards using the most top-left key instead of tilde.

We added pointer-events to the list of options for the HTML/CSS puzzles. This option allows you to disable pointer events for an element – for example, to make some button temporarily unclickable.

The set timer puzzle now uses a very big number instead of Infinity for its repeat input. This is to work around the problem with copying and pasting this puzzle reported by the community.

Finally, there were various minor UI tweaks here and there in the App Manager.

Documentation

We continued our never-ending work on the User Manual which received a new bunch of updates and improvements. Among significantly reworked sections are the Puzzles Reference, Shadows, HTML Interfaces, Verge3D Life Cycle, and API Reference. We also added a missing chapter on viewport setup and color management for Maya.

The downloadable sample files linked in the Server-Side Rendering and Plugins chapters have been updated to reflect recent changes in the engine. We also mopped up all orphaned assets and images in the User Manual folder making the distribution slightly smaller.