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Blend4Web Updated

15

Blend4Web has just released an update with support for better animation, particle systems and more.

Blend4Web Team writes:

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

In this release: a new demo scene, improved animation, particle system and geometry procedural generation.

We've created a new audiovisual scene - Azure Grotto. The demo includes the latest results of our efforts in the field of rendering, animation and physics. The combined effect of sophisticated lighting, dynamic reflection and refraction brings the user a unique and immersive experience.

Significant improvements of the animation engine. Now it's possible to apply up to 8 different types of animation to an object. Among them: object, skeletal and vertex animation, emission of particles and parametrization of speaker parameters. It's also possible now to control the speed and direction of animation (e.g. forward/backward play).

Extended capabilities of emission and transformation in the particle system. Such params as size, initial velocity and count can be changed though the API. This new functionality gives a wide range of effects (for example lighting a fire, correctly displaying smoke trail from the exaust pipe etc).

Extended functionality and improved performance for node materials. New Combine HSV and Separate HSV have been implemented. By using vector arithmetics we managed to considerably decrease the number of shader instructions. Also the range of supported hardware has been increased (e.g improved support for iOS devices). Node groups have been implemented to allow multiple usage of shader blocks.

Low-level APIs have been added to manipulate the geometry in run-time. This feature allows to procedurally generate meshes of any complexity level (e.g. to create constructions à la Minecraft).

 

15 Comments

  1. Is it just me, or is that model very high poly? It is very gpu & cpu intensive for me, but it ran smoothly most of the time.

    • Ah, maybe Indy and you are running it on ultra when I wasn't? It didn't seem to use any cpu/gpu until I noticed that button, now it's using 25% cpu, and my cpu is at 81%. Still smooth as butter for me though.

  2. Mircea Kitsune on

    I love this! But if someone wants to go for the real thing, my suggestion is instead creating a web player for the Blender Game Engine. That would easily allow everything I'm seeing here, plus full interactivity. We might even be able to succeed Flash / HTML5 games that way!

  3. Mircea Kitsune on

    Also, I found a minor bug: If you zoom in too close, the glass becomes green. I'm also seeing green pixels around the seams of the cave walls.

  4. This seams awesome, so now we can put our blend files on our own webservers for display ???
    I mean, can i just put this on my apache webserver that would be amazing.

    I'm not sure how you guys do it, this BI rendering at realtime ?.. or what ??

  5. On my machine at this time (disclaimer disclaimer) this demo causes WebGL to crash on Firefox at "high" and no way to access the button to change it down to "low" setting. It does run on Chrome, but if I set it to "Ultra" on Chrome it does the same thing. The hitch is, the only way to get it back to the default setting of "high" was to clear my browser cache. This points to a possible improvement for the interface: allow a choice of setting prior to loading the WebGL environment.

    This might be a result of my processor or my operating system or a matter of how many users are accessing at once, but whatever the cause, it still points out a weak link in the interface: an potentially unrecoverable application crash that could be circumvented by making "low" the default setting -OR- alternatively, allowing the choice to be made prior to the load.

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