Outstanding update!
I haven’t had a chance to review all the features, but UV transformation and Automatic camera path calculation are super useful.
Keep up the good work!
3 Likes
Hi @wojtek ,
I am not getting the prompt to update my version to this latest release. Is there any way to force update the desktop app?
Thanks.
@nishantambekar, your account had particular beta version assigned. Please restart Shapespark one more time - it should update to 2.6.0 now.
1 Like
Shapespark 2.6.1 is out with the following changes:
- Improvements for troubleshooting meeting issues:
- Connection quality indicator. The meeting control panel now includes a three-level quality indicator showing the current quality of the meeting connection.
- Meeting connection preflight test. The viewer performs a short connection tests before the participant joins the meeting to detect critical connection issues, for example a firewall blocking the connection.
- Exclusive option for audio/video-related extensions. The Audio, VideoTextureControl and VideoStream extension have a new option Exclusive that allows only one exclusive extension to be playing at a given moment. If an exclusive extension is playing while the visitor clicks a trigger of another exclusive extension, the playing one is paused.
- Look around smoothing for walk views controlled with a mouse or touchscren.
- Several fixes and improvements to automatic camera path computation, including:
- Improve path precision when there are large non-colliding background objects in the scene, for example a custom sky sphere or planes with 2D images of the surrounding.
- Fix teleport executed through the viewer API not being instant for maxTime = 0.
- Fix cutout textures not being detected when imported in the scene editor. This led to inconsistent texture look between the edit and view modes.
- Fix type of imported lights being impossible to change because of the linked property
not reacting to clicks. - Fix performance problems in scenes where visibility of large hierarchies of objects was controlled by the Switch objects extension.
- Fix desktop application not remembering the folder of the last selected file for model or texture import. The issue occured only on some systems where Shapespark was installed long-time ago.
- Fix inconsistent font use in the desktop application.
2 Likes
We’ve just rolled out Shapespark 2.6.2 - a bugfix release with the following changes:
- Make the SketchUp exporter include light roll (rotation around the lighting direction). This enables adjusting ligjt roll in SketchUp for lights that are later changed into non-axially symmetric in Shapespark, for example: an area light, or a point light with an IES profile.
- Fix looking around using keyboard that was broken in the previous release.
2 Likes
Shapespark 2.7.0 is out with the following changes:
- Improved ambient occlusion. Ambient occlusion is now a separate feature from ambient light, and is applied to the total light a surface receives, not only to the ambient part of the light, which makes the effect much more visible. Furthermore, the intensity of ambient occlusion can be controlled with the Intensity setting.
- Fog. The Sky tab has new settings allowing to enable fog effect in the scene and control the fog color, density and distance from the camera.
- Protected scenes. An uploaded scene can now be made protected, in which case Shapespark generates a secret that must be included in the scene URL for the scene to be opened. Knowing a scene name or having a public scene URL is insufficient to open a protected scene.
- Custom icons on extension triggers. Trigger configuration now offers the possibility to upload a custom icon in addition to selecting one from the pre-defined list.
- Interaction prompt. The prompt is an animated banner shown after the scene has been loaded to indicate that the scene is interactive. It can be enabled in the Viewer tab.
- Video meeting improvements:
- Custom avatars in 3D meetings. Such avatars can be configured in collaboration with the Shapespark team and are available only in the Premium plan. More details can be found in the announcement.
- Synchronize scene changes made with the Switch objects extension between meeting participants.
- Use Simulcast technique to adapt video resolution to the participants’ internet connection bandwidth.
- Limit the size of the participant list and make it scrollable to make the user interface less crowded on small screens.
- Allow to disable panning in the orbit mode. The Orbit mode settings now include a checkbox for this.
- Exporters’ improvements fixes:
- Export SketchUp group name as Shapespark object type name.
- Export SketchUp component instance name in addition to component definition name. The Shapespark object type name is now created from joining the two names.
- Prevent light names conflicts when Shapespark lights are copied between SketchUp models.
- Fix removing a material map in 3ds Max not being applied to a Shapespark scene on scene update.
- Make video textures added in the editor tile if they are of power-of-two dimensions.
- Block exporting a scene from SketchUp, Revit or 3ds Max exporter if there is already some operation, eg. bake, in progres for the scene. This prevents simultaneous scene modifications that could potentially lead to scene corruption.
- Add viewer API functions for VR mode management:
-
Viewer.vrEnabled- checks if the VR mode is enabled, -
Viewer.enableVr- enables the VR mode, -
Viewer.disableVr- disables the VR mode.
-
- Cloud editor leaves beta.
4 Likes
Wow… You are the best!
2 Likes
Thank you very much for your efforts, Shapespark team!
I have 1 question about the 3D meeting avatar.
Is the custom avatar feature applied to each scene or each account?
We’ve just rolled out Shapespark 2.8.0 with the following list of changes:
- Grass material: new material type that gives an authentic grass appearance.
- PBR specular reflections: improve rendering specular reflections by applying Physically-Based Rendering interpretation of roughness and metallic settings. Now, these settings impact in Shapespark should be more consistent with analogous settings in other 3D tools.
- Tone mapping and contrast presets: the Camera tab now offers a few tone mapping and contrast presets, providing better control over the tonal range of the scene.
- Color mapping: the Camera tab also offers a list of predefined color maps that users can choose from, for example: cool, sepia or grayscale, to give the scene a particular tone.
- Scene size indicators with warnings if the scene is likely too large for lower end devices. The indicators are available in the Objects tab.
- Make setting up sun position in the Lights tab easier by displaying the sun direction as an arrow pointed to the center of the scene.
- Make the default sun color more warm and the default sky color more cool to improve the natural lighting realism.
- Precise setting of the view position: the camera position can be now adjusted in the View tab with numeric input fields.
- Display warning about materials that are used by an extension but that are no longer present in the scene.
- Improve meeting connection preflight test to detect another type of critical connection issues.
- Support for Revit 2024.
- Support for 3ds Max 2024.
- Fix the issue of MP4 video textures not playing on iOS 16, which caused scene loading to never finish.
- Fix ambient occlusion producing too dark edges where surfaces meet.
- Fix custom trigger images not working for bundled scenes.
- Fix material picker not opening if it contains a missing material.
- Fix end of meeting in case of network connection problems to consistently disconnect the participant from all sides of the meeting.
- Fix 3ds Max exporter removing light IES profiles added in the Shapespark scene editor.
- Fix the desktop application being blocked for a team member when the member has an own expired subscription.
6 Likes
Nice update! Does the PBR material support normals?
No, as before it supports bump map only.
1 Like
I’m really liking this grass material. Very nice!
4 Likes
Shapespark 2.8.1 is out with the following changes:
- Experimental support for baking on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture GPUs, including the RTX 40xx family graphics cards.
- Make HSL correction of base color textures accurate to widen the applicable correction range. Previously, the correction was approximated which led to incorrect results in some cases.
- Fix a bug introduced in version 2.8.0 that caused texture atlas generation to fail for some scenes, leading to “failed to generate web textures” error during scene upload or bundle.
A change in the Collection has changed the color of the material in the delivery scene considerably.
Is there any way to calculate the values to restore the original colors?
It is good to change for the better, but please remember that some scenes have already been delivered.
Also, is it possible to use the desktop application without updating the older version?
The new version has an algorithm to convert old (approximate) HSL correction settings to new (accurate) ones, but it seems it didn’t work for your case. Could you share a link to this scene (via support@shapespark.com if the scene is not public), so we could take a closer look at the issue and see if we can improve the conversion algorithm.
The Shapespark desktop application always upgrades itself to the newest version, so even if you installed a previous version, it would eventually perform an upgrade.
We’ve just rolled out Shapespark 2.8.2:
- Motion blur. This effect blurs the image when the camera moves, which helps to make the motion perception more natural. It is available in the Camera tab.
- Scene assets size reduction leading to shorter scene opening time: lightmaps size reduced by about 40%, geometry data size reduced by about 25%.
- Made camera movement smoother on surfaces with holes like, for example, wooden piers. The camera no longer drops into the holes.
- Fixed scene cover images to show only the first object of each Switch Object extension. Previously, the cover images included all the objects switched between.
1 Like
A bugfix 2.8.3 release is out:
- Fixed scene update failing for a scene that already has a lightmap baked.
We’ve rolled one one more bugfix release for Shapespark 2.8. Version 2.8.4 contains the following change:
- Fixed incorrect rendering of material colors in material picker after the scene is baked.
1 Like