We’ve just released Shapespark 1.17.2. Here are the most important changes:
Revit exporter improvements:
Convert Revit light color temperature to Shapespark light color.
Convert Revit light intensity to Shapespark light strength. For now the conversion supports only spherical & spot light distributions.
Fix exporting rotation for Revit lights with photometric (IES) distribution.
Improve accuracy of metallic and roughness properties conversion.
Fix certain transparent materials being exported as non-transparent.
Make Shapespark object type/light name include also the Revit family name, in addition to the Revit type name.
Skip exporting level indicators.
Increase reflection sharpness in the [0; 0.1] roughness range.
Reduce memory usage for scenes having multiple triggers with the same text or icon.
Do not use PVRTC compressed textures for HDR skies because the compression introduces significant artifacts.
Pause video textures when the scene webpage becomes hidden, and resume them when the webpage becomes active again. This fixes an issue with Chrome which pauses some videos but does not resume them automatically.
Allow to use the Shapespark desktop application on computers with HTTP proxies that store TLS/SSL certificates in the Windows Certificate Store.
Do not show back sides of triangles in the render preview to maintain consistency with the viewer.
New extension trigger icons: pen, sticky note, pen+paper.
Fix disabling the sky light not being respected. The bug was introduced in 1.17.1.
Fix lightmap being baked without the post-processing step if a scene had never been saved in the editor.
Fix missing texture error occurring in some cases when a water material was changed to a standard material.
We’re delighted to let you know that we’ve just released Shapespark 2.0 with numerous improvements:
Video meetings within the 3D scenes allowing simultaneous visitors to see where each other are in the 3D space and talk using their devices’ microphones and cameras. Available in the Standard and Plus subscription plans and for the perpetual license. See the announcement for more details.
Teams: a Shapespark account can make subscriptions payments for several users and allow these users to upload scenes to the main account. Teams are available in the Standard and Plus subscription plans. See the announcement for more details.
3ds Max exporter plug-in enabling direct export from 3ds Max to Shapespark without the need to use an intermediate 3D file format. The exporter reads basic properties from both Standard (Scanline) and V-Ray materials.
Scene objects can be configured to always face the camera. This enables using sprites/billboards in the scene or adding custom extension triggers that rotate to be always directed towards the camera.
Support for baking on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs, including the RTX 30xx family graphics cards.
Revit exporter improvements:
Export door objects with collisions disabled by default.
Export the Revit’s active perspective 3D view as the initial view in the Shapespark scene.
Added meta description tag to the scene’s index.html to make the scene appearances in web searches more descriptive and user-friendly.
Default styling for links in HTML labels.
Fix unmuted video textures not being played when the scene is loaded with #autoplay . Such textures start to play when the visitor makes a first interaction with the scene.
Pause video textures when an HTML label is opened and resume them when it’s closed. This is a workaround for low Chrome & Edge performance when hardware video decoding is used at the same time the GPU is occupied with 3D rendering. Previously HTML labels containing videos made the scene unresponsive in these browsers.
Fix sprite extension triggers being captured by light probes.
Worked around z-fighting issues in Safari on certain Mac hardware configurations.
Fix baking for scenes where all baked objects have isolated shadows.
Thank you so much for update, But i am having issue with the Object facing the camera, my object gets disapperaed (i think get moved to some different unknow location) this i tried it on a single polygon face . For a some other geo for example a 3d geo person, if i do face to camera, it faces 90 degree rotated geo of what it is now. Not sure whats the issue is with. even if their pivot is at center. Has anyone tried this and it worked, please let me know if i am doing it wrong.
I tested, the object disappears while I am in the objects tab. However, it is there when I return to the other tabs. Try resetting XYZ of your 3d object in the primary modeling program.
Ok i tested this abit and found the if i keep my object with -90 degree on Y-axis offset in my modeling program than after i enable camera facing it show the object facing camera fine. also the object doesnt disapper, it was just that it was getting rotated 90 after enabling camera facing and i could just see thin line which was barely noticable, but after keeping offset of -90 degree on Y axis it works fine for me.Dont it if this is a bug or just issue with my export program.
Right, for the rotation to work correctly, the front of the object needs to be aligned with the scene Y axis (face towards the positive values of the Y axis). To check the axis orientation in Shapespark, you can select any light or a light probe in Shapespark editor and it will show the scene Y axis in green.
As you discovered, if for example a back of a single sided 2D surface is facing the positive values of the Y axis, this invisible back will be rotated to always face the camera, and the object will be always invisible.
@jorgearq, could you send us a problem report from the “Help& Support” tab of the application? The report will contain applications logs with more information about the issue.
That’s it, just by restarting the application the issue was fixed. I have not done anything directly, however, I have programs that may have done a cleanup without me noticing and that could have caused the error. Thank you.
Hi Please help, i have 3ds Max 2016. is there any way i can manually install the 3dsmax shapespark extension? since the latest release only supports 2019 - 2021
Unfortunately not. We support only the three most recent versions of 3ds Max, and the extensions for the oldest of the three - 3ds Max 2019 - are not compatible with 3ds Max 2016.
However, the old way of exporting models from 3ds Max to Shapespark via FBX or DAE is still supported.
Hi, Thanks for the quick reply. Okay i understand, I’ve exported using the old way which was fine of course but i just want to get some clarity since I’ve used a script that turns all my vray materials into standard materials before exporting it as an fbx and into shapespark, now is there any difference in the way the vray materials would come into shapespark compared to the old way i just explained? As in would i need to do less material modifications in shapespark for example
The exporter for 3ds Max supports basic Standard and V-Ray material types and properties. So, at this moment the export result should be comparable to your workflow using the material converter script and FBX exporter. However, we plan to evolve the exporter to support more material types & properties, and then the difference will be more significant.
We’ve just rolled out Shapespark 2.0.1 which is primiarily a bugfix release:
3ds Max exporter improvements and fixes:
Significant speedup of the export process.
Fix export failure for models with single-material objects being the only child of the parent.
Fix material names being exported with different suffixes in subsequent exporter runs. This prevented correct merging of properties set in Shapespark with the properties coming from 3ds Max.
Fix upload error for scenes containing files of unrecognized content type in the extra-assets directory. Such files are now ignored.
Would shapespark ever consider being able to record movement in a baked scene by a pre-assigned camera path that was assigned before baking the scene? for example, when someone imports their model into shapespark they make sure that they have splines in their scenes which can be assigned as camera paths, after that if they want to do a cinematic of their already baking scene people can either choose to move around freely like normal or they can switch to a cinematic mode which will basically be moving around the scene in a controlled path along with the ability to record that motion and save it out as an mp4 which can be saved on your machine or can be shared online if you don’t want to do any editing.
I would imagine this feature to be suitable with a limit for each shapespark plan. 5 minute limit recording for starter plans, 10 minute limit for standard plans, and 30 minutes for plus plans. These limits would be the amount of minutes you may record and save out across all the shapespark scenes that you have. Would be awesome, realtime animation by essentially screen recording a cinematic path of a baked scene!
@Lungelo_Cele, thanks for the suggestions. We have been considering the idea to define camera paths, and also to record videos, but unfortunately we won’t be able to implement them in the near future.
Great, I understand. Maybe we might get it on Shapespark 3.0? Haha just kidding but that would be epic, I get that there are other areas you still need to improve and add from existing and recently released features and bug fixes which I imagine take up a lot of the team’s time. Thanks for the awesome work the whole team is doing for the whole ShapeSpark community to use and enjoy!
