Blender 4.2 migration guide

Blender 4.2 is a kinda significant update as it includes the new version of the Eevee render (called Eevee-Next internally).

This new version relies heavily on modern GPUs and raytracing algorithms for viewport rendering, hence it's not quite compatible with Verge3D. To overcome this, we implemented several changes which you should be aware of.

Transparency

Transparency settings from the older Blenders looked like these:

Most of them removed in Blender 4.2, some that remained are mostly useless now. To fix this, we've implemented several custom settings for transparency (on the material panel):

The new setting "Transparency Hacks" might be really useful to combat various transparency artifacts.

Redundant Nodes

When you open older scenes in Blender 4.2 you'll see a bunch of new nodes added to the end of the shader graph:

These can be safely removed. The easiest way to do this would be deleting the "EEVEE" part entirely and switching the "Cycles" output to "All".

Shadows

There is no way to configure size (in pixels) of shadow cascades in Blender 4.2, but we've added these settings back:

Same story is with "Clip Start" and "Bias" settings (assigned for light sources):

As well as for cascaded shadows:

To switch shadow casting on individual objects, there is a property on the "Visibility" panel which is used instead of material setting from older Blenders.

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion settings have been removed in Blender 4.2, we've recreated them as custom Verge3D settings:

Light Probes

Some settings for spherical and planar light probes have been removed in Blender 4.2, but you can find the missing ones below, on the Verge3D panel:

Installing third-party extensions

If you need to install a third-party extension from disk, keep an eye on the "Repository":

For the reason unknown this might be set to "Soft8Soft" by default, which is probably not what you want! Switch this prop to "User Default" before installing.

WTF, you must support Eevee-Next in Verge3D properly!

Unfortunately this is not quite possible due to the following reasons:

• There is no hardware-accelerated raytracing APIs available in the browsers (at least at the moment)

• Raytracing is really slow and won't be practical for web-based interactives (possibly for decades).

In general, the only things we can do now, is to approximate Verge3D rendering so that it is more or less consistent with Blender viewport.