Blend4Web 17.06 Released

Blend4Web is a technology that enables you to create games or applications entirely in Blender but publish them to the web, powered by WebGL.  The 17.06 release brings several new features including support for most Blender constraints, experimental AR support, a new camera logic node as well as new lighting and reflection features.

Details of the release from the release notes:B4W

New Features
  • Support for essential Blender constraints.

    Copy Location, Copy Rotation, Copy Transforms and Track To are available to use now. Also the following API methods have been added: append_copy_loc, append_copy_rot and append_copy_trans.

  • Experimental Augmented Reality support.

    Check out the AR application to get the look of the feature we’re going to improve much in our next releases. The application can be found in the apps_dev/AR folder and is also available in Project Manager.

  • New logic node Set Camera Limits.

    This node allows changing limits of the camera. Each limit can be set separately. Only limits available for current move style of the camera are applied after node execution.

  • Improved AA rendering.

    Scheme of rendering post-processing effects has been changed. It increases performance and quality of the anti-aliasing.

  • New experimental environment lighting algorithm for scenes with Cycles materials.

    Materials with Glossy BSDF and Diffuse BSDF nodes automatically enable environment lighting, which takes into account roughness of the glossy component.

    New algorithm requires WebGL 2.0 or WebGL 1.0 with available extension EXT_shader_texture_lod for correct work.

  • Optimized rendering of reflections.

    Cube reflections for scenes with no reflexible objects has been optimized. Now in such scenes the sky is used for reflections directly without redrawing for each individual reflective object.

  • Support for camera loading.

    From now on it’s possible to load additional cameras to the scene using dynamic loading feature.

  • Physics API improvements.

    Added set_angular_velocity. It allows to set object’s angular velocity.

Changes
  • The “pivot” setting in the “params” parameter for the target_setup method has been made optional.
  • The Material API was improved to provide more clear messages in the browser console in case of errors. Also two methods have been added: is_node_material and is_water_material.
  • Sequential video fallback for video textures isn’t applied anymore in MS Edge due to the native support for HTMLVideoElement.
Fixes
  • Fixed incorrect rendering of materials with normal mapping.
  • Fixed VR code snipped.
  • Fixed keyboard events when the engine is working inside an iframe.
  • MSAA is disabled from now on for Adreno 4xx/5xx GPUs to prevent some rendering bugs.
  • Fixed translating/rotating of non-active cameras.
  • Fixed getting coordinates for mouse/touch events via the get_coords_x and get_coords_y methods.
  • Fixed bug with looped speakers that couldn’t be stopped in Firefox after calling the stop and the play methods sequentially.
  • Fixed sky redrawing after world node material parameters change.
  • Removed auto applying modifiers for objects with the Array modifier.
  • Fixed rendering artifacts for the transparent node materials in Firefox under Linux.
  • Fixed applying a node material animation after material inheritance.
  • Workers were disabled for physics simulation in IE11 and MS Edge to improve physics stability.

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