Shapespark 2.3 is out with the following list of changes:
Use WebP format to store lightmaps. Reduces lightmap transfer size by about 50%.
Use Brotli compressor for geometry buffers. Reduces geometry transfer size by 10-25%.
Upgrade Cycles rendering engine to 2.92.
Improves baking performance by 10-20%.
Improves utilization of multi-GPU devices with different GPU models. Unlike in the previous versions, mixing GPUs of different performance speeds up baking.
Reduces memory usage while baking scenes with multiple lightmaps or with many objects using the Isolate shadows option.
Improve frame-rate for scenes with complex geometries by optimizing vertices order. Such optimization leads to more efficient GPU memory access patterns.
Upgrade Basis compressor to version 1.13. Improves texture compression speed 2-3 times leading to shorter scene uploads.
sRGB and HSL modes in the editor color picker.
Filters to facilitate finding materials and extensions in the editor.
GPU compressed formats and Auto scale resolution settings intended to improve quality of key textures in a scene (for example, art works in virtual galleries) at the expense of larger texture size.
A new Video stream extension to attach a HLS video stream to a texture.
Decrease the step of the emissive material strength to 0.1. Allows making subtle material-based light sources, like displays or dimly glowing lamps. Low emission strength can also be used as a trick to make a material appear a bit brighter.
Allow configuring text color of triggers.
Use WebGL2 and centroid sampling on devices that support it to reduce lightmap aliasing artifacts.
Allow using assets stored in the scene extra-assets directory from the HTML Label extension and head-end.html / body-end.html files. For example, an HTML Label can use a logo.png image from the extra-assets directory with an HTML code like:
Allow configuring geometry quantization with vertexAccuracy parameter in config.json . Higher accuracy improves geometry quality for high resolution, detailed models at the expense of larger geometry size.
Two new icons for triggers: search and expand.
Fix for videos being muted in some cases even though they were configured to play with sound.
3ds Max exporter improvements:
Support 3ds Max 2022.
Shorten export times by improving the textures processing performance and introducing texture cache reusable between exports. The cache can be cleared with the new Clear exporter cache item in the Shapespark menu.
Support Opacity Map.
Support metallic channel.
Support Physical Material’s Cutout Map.
Fixed a crash when trying to export a scene with too long name.
Make Revit exporter support Revit 2022.
3D meetings improvements:
Camera and microphone preview and test page before joining a meeting.
A more visible laser pointer that meeting participants can use to draw other participants’ attention to places in the meeting space.
A visual indicator of who is speaking in the meeting.
A button to leave the meeting.
Rotate avatar head if the meeting participant’s camera is in a portrait mode.
Detect collisions between avatars.
JavaScript API improvements:
Allow toggling help popup through the JavaSript API.
Hi all,
for some reason this update did not install the exporter for 3ds max 2022. After few reinstalls and restarts I managed to install it manually by copying plugin files to 3ds max 2022 folders.
We’ve just released 2.3.1 version that fixes registering the 3ds Max exporter plug-in for 3ds Max 2022 and the Revit exporter add-in for Revit 2022.
@Zando, after you update to 2.3.1 remove the files you manually copied to 3ds Max 2022 folder to avoid conflicts between the automatically and manually installed plugin.
Thank you, @wojtek.
I thought I understand this but it is not working for me. This is my code:
{
“devices”: [
“CUDA_GeForce GTX 1080_0000:09:00”,
“CUDA_GeForce GTX 1080_0000:41:00”
],<-ADD the comma
“vertexAccuracy”`: 0.000001** ← ADD this line with individual setting
}
After importing the model looks perfect. But after I bake the scene the compression looks as if there wasn’t any adjustment in the code done.
This leads me to two questions:
When the compression of the model is a part of the baking process, it can be adjusted in the code even after importing the model. Does every new bake give the chance to play with the settings without the need to re-importing the model first?
Why is my code not working?
Update
This morning everything went well. It seems that Update 2.3.1 somehow was loaded but couldn’t be executed and was blocking the application. I restarted Shapespark and now it is working.
I forgot to write that you need to restart Shapespark for the change to be effective (the configuration file is read only when Shapespark desktop application is started). I’ve updated my post above.
BTW, the vertex position quantization takes place when the scene is imported, baked or post-processed. So after you change vertexAccuracy for an already baked scene, it’s enough to re-run just post-processing (after restarting Shapespark).
I’m happy to announce the release of Shapespark 2.3.3.
Changes:
New example-room scene, prettier and more spacious.
Fix lightmap compression related artifacts that were present in some scenes starting from Shapespark 2.3.
Fix bake error for the included example-room scene.
Make SketchUp export tolerate broken textures. If a texture cannot be exported from SketchUp, the material is exported as solid red and the export process doesn’t fail.
Fix bundling scenes for self-hosting to be compatible with web servers using Brotli compression.
We’ve just released Shapespark 2.3.4 with the following list of changes:
Allow to rename and make copies of scenes from the desktop application main window.
HTML Label extension improvements: options to center the label horizontally and vertically and to disable the HTML content padding. Animate opening and closing of the label.
In the orbit view zoom to the mouse/touch pointer instead of zooming to the orbit center.
3D meetings: allow to select camera and microphone devices while joining a meeting.
Fix uploading and bundling for scenes with sky being the only texture used by the scene.
3ds Max exporter fixes:
Fix failure for missing IES files and for non-ASCII IES filenames.
Fix handling of invalid texture in color channel of VRayLight material.
There are three new options for the HTML label extension to show the label centered on the screen, and to remove the padding (eg. if the whole label is to be filled with an image).
Plus, the label open/close is now animated - you can try it in our demo room: 3D scene
We’ve just rolled out Shapespark 2.3.6 - a bugfix release with the following changes:
Fix duplicated meshes rendered black after baking. The issue was introduced in 2.3.4 by an optimization to bake only one duplicate from a set of duplicated meshes placed exactly in the same position. It turned out that such duplicates are common in user scenes, so the optimization was reverted.
Fix bundles not working in certain self-hosting environments.
We’ve just released Shapespark 2.4.0 containing the following changes:
Show an indicator in which place a click triggered movement will finish.
Integrate AI-based denoiser which is much more effective at removing noise. The new denoiser significantly improves shadow contrasts, and allows to reduce the baking time by lowering the number of samples. The new denoiser can be turned on with the AI-based denoiser (beta) option. It is in beta stage, for scenes with detailed geometry, in particular containing long thin elements, it can introduce denoising artifacts.
Allow to choose the viewer UI language from the following set: English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish.
Allow to download a scene from the Shapespark hosting to the desktop application.
Add name filter to scene list and allow to order the scenes in the list by their modification time.
Do not apply HTML customizations (head-end.html , body-end.html , index.html) when the scene is opened in the editor. This prevents scene structure changes made with custom JavaScript code from being saved in the scene, potentially leading to scene corruption.
Allow to start the illumination preview from any tab of the scene editor by pressing the r key.
Add a new light instance in the same place as the currently selected instance instead of in the current camera position.
Increase keyboard walking speed when SHIFT key is pressed.
Support for zero camera speed to block the camera movement.
Add a 3D caption inside the scene play button to emphasize that the content is an interactive 3D experience, not a video.
When joining a meeting, instead of opening a new browser tab with Terms of Service or Privacy Policy, display these documents directly in the join dialog.
Display a message suggesting to use the native web browser if a scene fails to load in the web browser built into the Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp mobile apps.
Introduce a workaround for iOS 15.1 bug causing the browser to crash when joining a meeting using H264 streams.
Fix long import time for scenes with thousands of identical meshes.
3ds Max exporter fixes:
Do not fail the export on unresolved texture files.
Fix support for textures in .tx format which got broken in Shapespark 2.3.4.
Thank you for bringing the latest update. Can you please tell us how the new AI denoiser will enhance the overall look of our scenes ? As seen in the Editor, it’s just a checkbox. Can you share when a user is supposed to use it, and when it’s not supposed to be used ?
Guys, firts of all, thanks for this large update!!!
I tried to download one scene from cloud, but unfortunately, at the end of downloading, I received just “internal error” message. Is it just me?
