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.
A Shapespark update - 1.7.5 - has just been released. It brings such a feature:
Support for head-end.html and body-end.html HTML files allowing to customize the viewer UI. If present in the scene directory, these files are inserted as snippets, respectively, at the end of the <head> section and at the end of the <body> section of the scene’s index.html file.
We have just released Shapespark 1.7.6 with the following list of changes:
Allow to set the orbit mode angle limits. The new Angle limit setting in the Viewer tab allows to set the vertical orbit range within -90 and 90 degrees.
Introduce a naming convention that allows to import multiple objects as instances of the same type for file-based 3D model imports. If an object name starts from __NAME__ ( NAME preceded and succeeded by double underscores) it is imported as object of type NAME .
Fix viewer performance problems on Macs with Radeon GPUs.
Fix stairs climbing with click based teleport and VR gaze teleport. When the teleport destination was at the top or bottom of the stairs, the teleport could stop somewhere on the stairs before reaching the destination, which required additional teleport activations to climb the whole stairs.
Fix file-based imports of models that contain objects with empty geometries. Such models rendered black after the import.
Fix camera climbing onto clickable extension spheres for scenes with the camera Auto climb enabled.
Detect and show to the user CUDA out of memory bake errors. Such errors caused the lightmap to be baked black without any user visible message.
Allow to specify the initial view with the #view=view-name URL hash.
We have just released a new version: 1.7.7 with two fixes:
Fix an issue introduced in Shapespark 1.7.6 causing lightmap baking/post-processing errors for users with non-Latin characters in their Windows account name.
Fix SketchUp extension being unable to localize user’s temporary directory on some Windows configurations.
Yesterday we released Shapespark 1.8.0 with the following list of changes:
Share geometry buffers for instanced meshes in the Shapespark viewer. This significantly reduces the viewer memory consumption, especially for scenes with many repeating objects, like office spaces. Previously, the geometry was shared, but only in storage and transfer.
Make click and VR teleport pass through objects with collisions disabled.
Activate teleport when #view=view-name URL hash changes. It allows to use the Open website extension (now renamed to Open URL ) to switch to one of the views without reloading the scene.
Added #mobilehi URL hash to force mirror light probes generation on mobile devices. Mirror light probes used for mirror-like reflections are off by default on mobile devices to limit the memory usage.
Added #flipmouse URL hash allowing to make the mouse rotate the scene instead of the camera in the Walk view mode.