News - white_dune, X3D, movie textures, engine icon

July 15, 2008Various exciting news about development of our engine:

• White dune, free software VRML 97 modeler, can export normal VRML animations (expressed in terms of VRML interpolators) to our Kanim (Kambi animations) file format and it supports our extension nodes and fields (run with -kambi command-line option, or use "Start next time with kambi support" menu item). Thousand thanks for Joerg "MUFTI" Scheurich!

• Among the many new features already implemented in SVN are:

  • Reading X3D files, with all 40 X3D components, in both XML and classic VRML encodings, is implemented.

    Besides all features from VRML 2.0, many X3D-specific features are already supported, like geometric primitives [Indexed][Triangle/Quad][Fan/Strip]Set (8 nodes total). Rendering internals were reorganized into much smarter hierarchy, to handle these new X3D nodes as well as IndexedFaceSet and other VRML 97 and 1.0 nodes implemented since a long time.

  • Extrusion node handling.

  • New extensions, like BlendMode node (a subset of Avalon BlendMode node) and KambiInline (an Inline that can somewhat process the inlined content).

  • Texture department: Textures with full alpha channel are now nicely rendered with blending (and textures will simple alpha channel are still detected and rendered faster by alpha_test). Moreover, MovieTexture node is now handled (movie can be read from image sequences, like image%d.png, and from normal movie formats thanks to ffmpeg). As a demo, see the flames animation on the right.

  • Flames movie above was not only played in our view3dscene, it was also recorded directly by view3dscene. That's right: Screenshot options were much improved, it's now possible to capture animation as a movie file (with perfect quality, as opposed to using independent programs that capture OpenGL output).

    GNOME users will be happy to hear that view3dscene can be easily used as nautilus thumbnailer, so you can see thumbnails of your VRML / X3D and other 3D model files (see the screenshot).

• We have an icon for our engine and view3dscene. Next view3dscene release will be nicely integrated with GNOME (and other desktops that support relevant freedesktop specs). You can already appreciate engine icon at the top corner of our main page. Thanks to Kasia Obrycka for icon improvements!