Development Roadmap for 2015

We would like to direct your attention to the Blend4Web development roadmap for this year.
Go to the article.

I am happy to see so many good things being added and considered for near future development of Blend4web. I would like to add a couple things to consider; and reference some existing forum topics related to them.

The first would be the reference you gave to: "Extend possibilities of NLA Script even further."

As an advanced 3D user/creator, and not really a developer; I am not entirely sure what an NLA Script is or what function it provides. With that said; it seems to relate to my discussion here:

https://www.blend4web.com/en/forums/post/890/

I hope that this functionality is a reasonably high priority; as I could really build off such a feature. (Having a Object Outliner available to a user through the exported HTML file; which would not only allow them to show/hide objects; but also provide more information/notes/attributes, etc about each object. In my case this would be more for communicating manufacturing data about specific parts; which would be populated preferably through and xml or spreadsheet file, so that the attribute data can be synced to and from other sources or 3D programs.)

Another thought I had recently was kind of inspired by this post:

https://www.blend4web.com/en/forums/post/594/

I believe what this person is asking for; is a way to output an HTML file that allows an object to have multiple material choices which can be changed by the user in the viewer. (when I say "Multiple Choices"; my intention would be to curate those choices for the user. -For instance: if I were selling a product such as a mobile device case; and you could perhaps choose from cloth or leather; I want the user to be able to click on a button or thumbnail that then applies that material option. -I do not however intend for the user to endlessly change colors or materials that would not be available to them to buy.)

Going even a step further; would be to offer different versions of a product that might include different configurations or upgraded parts or features. (-Think of buying a car as an example; and choosing an upgrade to the bodywork such as ground effects, or a sporty front fascia . . . ) This might be a possibility through "Multiple Scenes" in Blender; and having Blend4web support exporting Multiple scenes. Maybe this is already possible; I have not tried it yet.

So to recap:

A) Multiple color or material choices for a single object

B) Multiple scenes that automatically hide and show specific objects; to show multiple, yet different, variations of a product; or perhaps even a Character.

Thanks Again for all your Hard Work!

Glad to see instancing may be implemented. Lots of interesting plans, I look forward to the upcoming releases.

As an advanced 3D user/creator, and not really a developer; I am not entirely sure what an NLA Script is or what function it provides.

NLA Script is a system of UI blocks to allow visual programming without the need to code. It is useful for simple cases such as click-and-play-animation.

https://www.blend4web.com/en/forums/post/890/

I hope that this functionality is a reasonably high priority;

This is marked in the roadmap as "Support scene metadata." The outliner you suggest could be based on these meta data. There is no plans to implement such outliner though because it is too application-specific in our opinion to be a part of engine. So perhaps you need somebody with programming skills to code such application.

A) Multiple color or material choices for a single object

This can be done using current APIs. Again, you need somebody who can program.

B) Multiple scenes that automatically hide and show specific objects; to show multiple, yet different, variations of a product; or perhaps even a Character.

Exporting multiple scenes which are contained in a single blend file is not supported; however you can just put them into separate blend files to be loaded at runtime. Again, you'll need to code in order to do this.

I hope my answer is not that disappointing . I don't really like to answer to the users with "If you need that, just code that". I think we could prepare typical examples for modifying 3D scenes interactively, in a form of tutorials or demo scenes. On the other hand, Blender devs have plans to implement "interaction" mode in the Blender viewport, which will eventually allow for many cases suggested by yours, to be implemented without any coding.

Thanks for your reply,

Yes, I need to get more familiar with "Coding"; it's just been something I have avoided most of my life, being more drawn to interactively creating content.

Your response about Blender's upcoming "Interactive" mode, not sure entirely what that entails, but my intention of changing Materials; was for myself to "curate" possible colors/materials and publish them to the output html file as choices the end-user could explore in the web viewer. So I am not sure if maybe you are saying that the new game "Interaction" mode will allow you to more easily support this or not.

I am willing to take a stab at coding; but the only way would be if I could be steered to some step by step tutorials as you mentioned.

Thanks again.

Your response about Blender's upcoming "Interactive" mode, not sure entirely what that entails, but my intention of changing Materials; was for myself to "curate" possible colors/materials and publish them to the output html file as choices the end-user could explore in the web viewer. So I am not sure if maybe you are saying that the new game "Interaction" mode will allow you to more easily support this or not.

Well, we may only guess how Blender interaction mode will look like. Ideally it could be node-based to allow rather advanced possibilities including interchanging materials. If such mode will work right in the Blender viewport, supporting it in Blend4Web will be a quite trivial task.

Wow. I guess most of my gripes with Blend4Web are addressed one way or another in this roadmap, this is incredible!
My favorites have to be support for blender's procedural textures and the commitment to help support them in Blender's viewport; and instancing support. Hope this fits in and coordinates well with the upcoming Blender Viewport Project too.

Ответ на сообщение пользователя Development Roadmap for 2015
Adapt the Blender interface to fit Blend4Web needs.
We plan to create a specific interface profile in which all supported parameters will be easily accessible.

Have you considered adding Blend4Web as an additional render engine to the interface? It is after all one form of an external rendering engine for most purposes, with specific rendering, world and material settings. That would allow you to natively add a specific set of rendering and material parameters separate from BGE or Blender Internal, hide away any unused parameters and unify displaying of stuff like the transparency and physics, uncluttering the interface.

I would also really love to see object instancing support. Hopefully will help reduce not only file-size (because it reuses data) and in browser memory consumption (recycling geometry), and with it support Blender per object materials so one can recycle geometry but change object color/materials, eliminating in the process the annoying warning about objects without materials.

Ответ на сообщение пользователя Development Roadmap for 2015
Support text objects.
We plan to implement automatic conversion of such objects to meshes upon export.

Maybe be a bit more broad here and fully support all curve object types instead, and do the same automatic conversion to mesh whenever possible?

Anyway thanks for your awesome support not only here on the forum, but for the great addon and for Blender developers either. It's great you take the time to publish this roadmap and the trust in your community to publish it.

Hi Duarte,

Thanks for your feedback and support!

Have you considered adding Blend4Web as an additional render engine to the interface? It is after all one form of an external rendering engine for most purposes, with specific rendering, world and material settings. That would allow you to natively add a specific set of rendering and material parameters separate from BGE or Blender Internal, hide away any unused parameters and unify displaying of stuff like the transparency and physics, uncluttering the interface.

Yes, we thought about integrating Blend4Web as an external renderer, and investigated this topic using the example of LuxRender. It appeared to work as follows: an artist sets up the scene and activates rendering using the Blender add-on, then the external renderer reads and processes the file, and finally, an output image is imported back in Blender and shown as a render result. This way we couldn't have achieved real-time rendering like in BGE or even Cycles. If we want more we must go further and add WebGL support to Blender, which could have done, for example, using Chromium Embedded Framework. This looks like a rather big project. Moreover, we should convince Blender devs to allow for such drastic changes.

For this reason we choose a simpler approach, at least in the near future. First, we will focus our efforts on reducing gaps between the viewport and our WebGL renderer. Second, we are going to create a Blend4Web UI profile, bringing there all supported settings from the BI and BGE. And finally, we plan to support new viewport features and to participate in the development.

Maybe be a bit more broad here and fully support all curve object types instead, and do the same automatic conversion to mesh whenever possible?

Absolutely! Thanks for suggesting this.

Ответ на сообщение пользователя Yuri Kovelenov
Hi Duarte,
This way we couldn't have achieved real-time rendering like in BGE or even Cycles. If we want more we must go further and add WebGL support to Blender, which could have done, for example, using Chromium Embedded Framework. This looks like a rather big project. Moreover, we should convince Blender devs to allow for such drastic changes.

Actually I was not being that ambitious, I can only imagine that would indeed be a huge and complex project hehe
I was merely stating that Blend4Web's group of settings and way of working as a lot more in common with the way other render engines integrate with Blender's UI then it has to do with a screen layout preset.

Having it as an option you could pick from the render engine menu would allow having an environment setup with all the material, world, object, physics and particle settings, and hidding watever is just not supported or redundant, just like the ones you get for cycles or luxrender or even BGE. All this without touching Blender screen layouts, since most users will probably have their own personal preference and most likely have their own customized layouts already setup.

You would still export from the export menu, or if you were feeling really original instead of having a render button you would just have an "export" button which would actually just create the HTML or corresponding JSON file instead, this could respect the "output" field like other renderers do, allowing a quick explicit way to re-export to the same file. At the most this could call the default system browser on the created file if the user intended so.