Change the auto-update mechanism to check for updates not only during the application launch, but every 4h.
Shapespark plugin for SketchUp suggests a valid scene names if a name entered by the user contains reserved characters.
Fixed bake failures for scenes with large objects that do not fit into a lightmap. A procedure that searched for a suitable lightmap resolution for such objects resulted in an error.
Fixed diffuse UV mapping for objects with very high UV values. Some UV mapping tools produce large, not normalized UV values that require good precision (for example values between 140000 and 140000.1). UV quantization rounded such large values which resulted in incorrect texture mappings.
Fixed handling of textures with commas in ICC profile names.
The updated version will install next time you restart Shapespark. Starting from this release, Shapespark will also check for updates every 4h, so if you restart infrequently, you will be still notified about new releases.
We are also adding buttons to help share your work on social media, so if your projects are not confidential, please try these buttons!
The release includes three bug fixes for various corner case scenarios. Bake failures for scenes with large objects affected several users that worked on scenes with large exteriors, please try to bake such scenes again.
It fixes an issue introduced in 1.5.1 that might have caused incorrect UV mapping in uploaded scenes. The issue was related to removing unused UV mappings performed automatically on scene upload. The removal phase worked incorrectly for objects using UV coordinates from a large range.
Sky texture can be now used in all types of views: walk, top and orbit. Sky texture visibility is controled with the Show sky texture setting in the Viewer tab. By default the sky texture is turned on only for walk-type views.
We’ve just released Shapespark 1.5.4 with the following list of changes:
Fix lightmap baking errors. For some scenes the baking process was failing at the very end of baking, which resulted in a message ‘Bake failed: process exited with non-zero status.’.
Fix reversed mouse navigation in Internet Explorer. IE was incorrectly detected as a mobile browser, so mouse navigation moved the model (as on touch-screen devices) instead of the camera.
Fix reflective materials not being rendered in Firefox on Android.
Allow to enter any values as light probe bounding boxes dimensions in the editor. The dimensions are now validated when the number input loses focus, not when the digits are typed.
Shapespark 1.5.5 is now available with following changes:
Do not allow a scene to be edited while a lightmap for the scene is baked.
Improved support for transparency in reflections. Transparent materials were not visible in the reflected image. After the change transparent pixels with low alpha (for example window glass) are not visible, but pixels with high alpha (for example leaves) are visible.
Highlight the destination view name after the user is teleported to the view.
Ensure minimum dimensions for GPU-compressed textures are respected. DXT and ETC1 textures are now at least 4x4, PVRTC at least 8x8.
An informative message if the user attempts to import SketchUp model via ‘.skp’ file instead of the extension for SketchUp.
Improved lightmap encoding to fix problems with high light intensity pixels in IE and Edge. Overexposed pixels were rendered as black in these two browsers.
Fixes handling of lights from FBX that were rotated by 90°.
Fixes importing of OBJ models that use textures with spaces in file names.
Fixed baking engine crashes for scenes that include objects with base color textures but with missing diffuse UVs.
An editor configuration option to limit the number of simultanously uploaded files. The option is intended for users that are behind proxies that do not allow for several concurrent uploads.
Shapespark 1.6.0 has just been released with following changes:
Three viewer extensions that increase interactivity of the scenes (configured in the editor ‘Viewer’ tab):
HTML label - allows to place additional information in the scene. Labels support HTML content, including text, images and videos (eg. YouTube or Vimeo videos).
Audio - allows to play audio when the scene is viewed.
Material picker - allows to change materials.
Attempt to automatically arrange light probes when a scene is imported for the first time.
Automatically lock mobile device orientation to landscape in the full-screen mode.
Fix a bug in the lightmap seam fixer that caused baking to fail for some scenes with very large triangles (eg. terrain triangles).
We haven’t managed to prepare a showcase for the viewer extensions, but we will post it on the forum next week.
Enable reflections on Edge, IE and Android devices.
Change the material picker extension to replace all uses of one material with the selected material. Previously it replaced the material only on one selected object type.
All lists in the editor (material list, view list, object tree etc.) are now automatically scrolled to an entity that is selected in the editor viewport.
Various editor UI improvements related to the viewer extensions.
Shapespark 1.6.2 has just been released with the following changes:
Icons for clickable extension spheres. As an alternative to text, spheres can now display icons from the subset of the Font Awesome icon font.
P key in the editor allows to save a screenshot of the scene. The screenshot renders the current view to a file with a resolution given by the user, so it can have higher resolution than the screen resolution.
Prettier and stackable editor notification pop-ups.
Fix horizontal head movements not working in the VR mode in Chrome 65 on Android.
Make hidden objects not intercept clicks into extension anchor spheres.
Use versioned resource paths in self-hosting bundles. Uploading a bundle with a new scene version to own hosting no longer requires using a new URL for the scene.
Any Tutorials for the interactive materials? I can create the icon and spheres but can’t seem to assign different materials from original to the spheres.
Shapespark 1.7.0 has just been released with the following changes:
Improved handling of alpha cutout textures, such as plant textures that use alpha channel to reduce plant geometry size. Such textures no longer exhibit render-order related artifacts.
Allow to set custom logo URL per each scene from the editor. Such custom logo takes priority over the custom logo set at https://cloud.shapespark.com/#settings.
Allow to customize color of clickable extension spheres.
Mark a view menu item immediately when the item is clicked. The view is marked with dark blue and switches to lighter blue when teleport to the view finishes.
Always show finished jobs in the Bake tab if the list of such jobs is non-empty.
Apply camera exposure and gamma also to the sky textures.
Viewer support for HDR sky textures. HDR sky textures are no longer converted to LDR format, but used as HDR by the viewer.
Make scene import finish successfully for a case when some input textures are corrupted. Such textures are replaced on import with solid red color textures, so they can be easily noticed after the import.
Self-hosting: Do not precompress HTML and CSS files in a self-hosting bundle. Several users experienced problems to configure web servers to serve precompressed HTML and CSS files without compressing them again. Also some windows FTP clients (FileZilla) incorrectly use ASCII mode to transfer compressed HTML and CSS files which corrupts the files.
Self-hosting: Use RewriteRule instead of SetEnv in the .htaccess file bundled for self-hosting. SetEnv is not available on some Apache hosting services, RewriteRule is widely available.
Fix a bug introduced in version 1.6.3 that caused compressed textures to be regenerated during each upload, which increased upload time.
Fix lightmap bake failures for meshes that consist only of degenerated triangles.
Yesterday, we released Shapespark 1.7.2 with the following list of changes:
Open Website viewer extension allowing to open a website as a reaction to clicking an extension sphere. In particular, it enables creating an interlinked set of scenes, where one can go from a scene to another by clicking an extension sphere.
Fix alpha-cutout texture detection not working for scenes without light probes.
Fix scene load error for scenes with materials using roughnes/metallic/bump texture but no diffuse texture.
Yesterday we released Shapespark 1.7.3 with the following list of changes:
Support for Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets.
For file-based 3D model imports allow to specify the up axis (Y or Z) if such information is not included in the 3D file format. Previously, Y up axis was always assumed in such cases.
For file-based 3D model imports allow to import multiple lights as instances of a single light. If an input light name starts from __NAME__ (NAME preceded and succeeded by double underscores) it is imported as an instance of a light named NAME.
Allow for any gamepad to activate the VR teleport. Previously, buttons of only one gamepad were handled.
Fix invalid camera yaw rotation after teleporting in VR.
Choose a more convenient default view if the scene has no views (for example because it has just been imported). The default view is now placed where most of the meshes are, not just in the scene bounding box center.
Fix sky sphere positioning to always wrap the whole scene.
Handle WebGL context lost & restore. In some cases, like entering VR mode on Microsoft Mixed Reality headset or switching on/off a GPU, the browser may take the WebGL context away from the Shapespark viewer and give it back after some time. Shapespark viewer now doesn’t fail in such cases, but switches to the restored context.
We have just released Shapespark 1.7.4 with the following changes:
Change click-based teleport to take maximum 4.5 seconds. Allows to faster navigate larger scenes.
Fix click-based teleport not handling clicks in objects further than 100 meters away.
Automatically generate favicons for scenes.
Support for custom-cover.jpg, custom-thumbnail.jpg, custom-favicon.ico images in the scene directory. Such images, if present, are used instead of automatically generated cover, thumbnail and favicon images.
Respect material Double sided setting during collision detection. Back sides of double sided materials now also trigger collisions.
Fix importing of multi-page TIFF images.
Read scale and up axis information from FBX. FBX imports no longer require setting these values in the import dialog.
Initial support for importing additional material properties via a JSON file passed together with the main model file (FBX, OBJ, DAE). The JSON allows to import roughness, metallic, bump and emissive properties. This is intended to help writing custom importers that won’t require the use of Shapespark editor to tune materials.