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.
Thank you very much for the work on shared geometry buffers for instanced meshes! It should give significant improvement on projects we are recently working on. Especially on lower end mobile devices
After updating to the latest version I can not bundle the scene. It shows an error hint:“Scene bundle failed : process exited with non-zero error status”
Sorry, the 1.8.2 version misses one file. We will fix it in the next release. For now, as a workaround please place the attached file in the following folder: C:\Users\<YOUR-USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Shapespark\app-1.8.2\resources\http-spark\spark\local\data.
On 12/31/2018 we released a new version - 1.9.0 - with the following list of changes:
Support for baking on NVIDIA Turing architecture GPUs (eg. RTX 20xx family graphics cards).
Baking on NVIDIA Fermi architecture GPUs (eg. GTX 4xx and GTX 5xx families graphics cards) is no longer supported. The Turing architecture requires CUDA 10.0 which is not compatible with the Fermi architecture.
Performance improvements decreasing baking time on CPU by about 35% and denoising time by about 50%.
Allow to select arbitrary subset of CUDA devices for baking. Previously either a single GPU or all GPUs could be selected.
Fix a regression introduced in 1.8.2 causing scene bundling to fail.
Shapespark 1.9.2 has just been released with the following changes:
Change the desktop full screen mode to show the mouse pointer. L key can be used to hide the pointer.
Increase the maximum resolution of screenshots taken in the editor (P key) to 8000 x 8000.
Make it easier to create orbit views. If a new orbit view is added while the camera is already in the orbit mode, the new view uses the current orbit center instead of the default one.
Save baking device selection for all scenes, not only the current one.
Shapespark 1.9.3 has been released, shortly after Shapespark 1.9.2, to fix an issue introduced in 1.9.2 causing scene save to fail if the desktop application configuration file is absent.
We have just released Shapespark 1.9.4 with the following changelist:
Fix CUDA devices not being detected for users whose Windows logins contain national characters.
Allow to automatically show the help pop-up during scene load using #help URL hash.
Fix WebGL context restoration for instanced geometries. This issue caused rendering artifacts in Windows Mixed Reality.
Fix looking around with mouse or keyboard arrows in the VR mode. Previously such controls used incorrect center of rotation.
Make unhiding the mouse pointer (L key) not exit the viewer’s full screen mode.
Fix importing opacity of solid color materials from the glTF file format.
Fix SketchUp exporter being unable to communicate with the Shapespark desktop application on systems where DNS does not resolve localhost to 127.0.0.1.
Update the version of NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit used for building Shapespark to 10.1.
We’ve just released Shapespark 1.10.0 with the below changelist:
Automatic lightmap resolution adjustment. Now, Shapespark automatically lowers the lightmap resolution to fit the scene in the given number of lightmaps. Previously, if the lightmap resolution was too high Shapespark requested the user to lower the lightmap resolution manually.
Significantly shorten the UV unwrapping time for spring-like shapes, for example: folded towels, folded bedclothes, springs. Now, the existence of such objects in the scene doesn’t lengthen the unwrapping process.
Make [ and ] keys switch to previous/next view.
Fix viewport size issues after orientation change on iOS devices.
Improve scene upload effectiveness on unreliable connections. The retry logic for the failed resource upload has been improved, and the number of retries has been increased.
Fix failure to import a 3D file when the file path contains Unicode characters.