The Blend4Web team proudly presents a new release of the opensource platform for creating 3D Internet apps to the community and its partners. The major features in this release are multiple improvements for mobile devices, support for high-resolution displays, improved Web Player and Blender Addon.
Development Roadmap 2015
Based on requests from our users, we have published Development Roadmap for 2015. In this document you can find out about the potential list of features to be implemented this year. Among developing new features, we plan to devote time to improving overall platform usability. Also, we have big plans to work on improving Blender and other opensource tools.
Continue Developing Pyatigor's Tale Series
For this release our team has prepared seventh tutorial about creating an arcade mini-RPG game. In this tutorial and the upcoming ones we teach you how to create immersive visual and sound effects and dynamic character animations.
The first level is almost ready, you can try it out and play here.
New Features for Mobile Devices
Support for panning on touchscreen devices. Panning is performed by swiping two fingers on the surface of the screen.
Support for high definition displays (HIDPI, Retina). The HIDPI mode allows to achieve considerable improvement of picture quality on devices with high resolution. This mode is activated automatically upon application startup if ULTRA quality profile has been selected. If necessary, high resolution can be turned on for other quality profiles.
Support for gyroscope on mobile devices. You can find an example of using this feature in our Viewer application by selecting the Gyroscope menu option.
Additional Engine Features
Support for orthographic camera scaling. An API to change the Orthographic camera scale has been added (Orthographic Scale in Blender).
The autorotate option has been added to the Web Player. This option can be used to turn on the automatic camera rotation as soon as the scene loads.
Support for video-textures on IE 11 and iPhone. The support is achieved by creating a new video-sequence format, *.seq. For more info check the following topic in documentation.
Ability to specify user-defined title in the Web Player. The title is extracted from the title tag, assigned on the scene in Blender.
Added support for compressed DDS (DXT) textures for the Web Player. Using compressed textures is more memory efficient and improves rendering performance.
The file hierarchy of the SDK has been simplified. We have also extended both the Free and Pro versions with new examples.
New Features of Blender Addon
Support for Text objects. These objects are now automatically converted to meshes during export without any user intervention.
Extended support for the NLA Script tool. We have added the new logic slots: Show Object and Hide Object used for hiding and showing the objects, Page Redirect for redirecting to other webpages, Page Param for storing any webpage parameters in a given numerical register. We have also simplified usage for Select & Jump and Select & Play slots. Now it’s not required to specify Selectable property on selectable objects.
Support for meta tags in Blender. It’s now possible to append meta tag information to scenes and objects in Blender. The possible tags for scenes are title and description. The possible tags for objects are title, description and category. A special API was created to work with tags. Our next step will be to extend our SDK applications to use and display information from these tags.
Added support for exporting converted media files to HTML files. It is now possible to store converted media files in HTML when you export them. To do so you need to enable the Export Converted Media option in export options.
Other
In this release we have worked hard to fix various errors and have made many minor improvements. Please check our release notes for the whole list.
As always, you are free to discuss this release on our forum.
