User posts Yuri Kovelenov
22 January 2015 17:11
22 January 2015 17:11
20 January 2015 21:59
20 January 2015 21:57
Hi Duarte,
Thanks for your feedback and support!
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.
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.
20 January 2015 11:31
20 January 2015 10:37
Hi,
Blend4Web uses Bullet physics engine, version 3.x of which is expected to support GPU-accelerated rigid body pipeline. Theoretically it could be possible to support WebCL in a JavaScript version of Bullet 3.x.
It appears however that the browsers vendors don't hurry to implement WebCL. It is only available as browser plug-ins or as experimental browsers builds. The main reason of this I think is that its counterpart, OpenCL, is currently not supported on mobile devices.
As a result, last year Khronos released the OpenGL ES 3.1 spec in which compute shaders were introduced for GPGPU tasks. We can assume that this feature will be eventually available in one of the future versions of WebGL, which is based on OpenGL ES.
Blend4Web uses Bullet physics engine, version 3.x of which is expected to support GPU-accelerated rigid body pipeline. Theoretically it could be possible to support WebCL in a JavaScript version of Bullet 3.x.
It appears however that the browsers vendors don't hurry to implement WebCL. It is only available as browser plug-ins or as experimental browsers builds. The main reason of this I think is that its counterpart, OpenCL, is currently not supported on mobile devices.
As a result, last year Khronos released the OpenGL ES 3.1 spec in which compute shaders were introduced for GPGPU tasks. We can assume that this feature will be eventually available in one of the future versions of WebGL, which is based on OpenGL ES.
18 January 2015 09:27
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.
18 January 2015 09:12
Hi,
refraction is supported both for generic (we call them "stack") and node materials. There should be a REFRACTION node group in this file so you can just append it to your file using File > Append menu.
BTW we plan to publish a tutorial within the next few days in which refraction node will be explained.![]( "smiling")
refraction is supported both for generic (we call them "stack") and node materials. There should be a REFRACTION node group in this file so you can just append it to your file using File > Append menu.
BTW we plan to publish a tutorial within the next few days in which refraction node will be explained.
18 January 2015 09:03
So you need to make a copy of your ground plane and assign a generic non-collision material to it.
17 January 2015 09:22