Blend4Web 14.07 Available

Our development team proudly presents the community and its partners with the new release of Blend4Web - the open source framework for creating interactive 3D web applications.

In this version:

• new photo-realistic demo,
• dynamic loading feature,
• Lamp Data node,
• and image-based lighting.

Detailed info:

We've created a new demo scene - “The Fountain”. To implement interior illumination a set of multiple light sources has been used. The combination of particle systems, node materials and a sound source perfectly simulates the water flow. The scene features realistic bronze and marble materials. The texture of the environment simulates the DOF effect and seamlessly blends with the scene objects.

Now we have the possibility to load and unload additional scenes at runtime (aka dynamic loading). This feature allows web applications to work with an unlimited amount of resources being loaded. For example, sales configurators, product catalogues, game levels can be now built effectively.

The engine's ambient model has been extended for environment maps to make much more realistic local scenes possible (this is also known as image-based lighting).

The skydome can be now set up with the Blender's standard tools; a specially crafted model had to be used for this task before.

Added support for the visual shader editor's Lamp Data node, that has been implemented in Blender 2.70. The node provides some light source parameters which can be useful for creating various interesting effects (e.g. to simulate subsurface scattering).

We've optimized the particle shaders for a wider range of supported devices; also we've implemented lighting models for particles (earlier shadeless was the only option).

3D object picking is now straightforward - we've improved the API and the sensor model for this.

Physics simulation issues are now resolved for low-spec hardware. For this, another timeline has been introduced to the physics engine thread to make it independent from the main thread timeline. As a result we've greatly improved the physics simulation quality in browsers which support the high-precision timer performance.now(). Also the performance has been increased thanks to removing redundant synchronization between threads. The physics update frequency has been doubled for the ULTRA profile (120 Hz).

Some new tutorials were published to describe the cloth simulation workflow, the programming of sophisticated application logic and the creating of game animation and FX. The source files of the applications and models are included as part of the GPLv3-licensed Blend4Web SDK distribution.

Some minor animation improvements. Particularly the mistiming between animations of different types has been removed.

The sound playback quality has been improved when audio sources move abruptly. Specifically, the API for Doppler effect recalculation has been added. Now the engine doesn't freeze when browsers lack the required codecs.

We've resolved the issue with scrolling the rendering canvas on mobile devices.

For the parallax relief mapping a new parameter can be now used to specify the distance from which the effect is observed.

The Blender addon now works under Windows 8.1, Centos 6+ and all Ubuntu versions since 10.04.

A compatibility mode for the pointer lock feature has been implemented for the cases when this API is not supported by browsers (Safari, IE), or when the user had refused to lock his or her mouse cursor.

The issue of insufficient shader precision on GPU Mali-604 devices, that led to incorrect fog rendering, is now fixed.

"The Island" demo graphics has been optimized for wider range of supported mobile devices.

The API documentation now contains description of the engine's configuration parameters. A newly implemented functionality is mirrored in the user manual as well.