Soft8Soft ships Verge3D 2.5 for 3ds Max and Blender
Soft8Soft has released Verge3D 2.5, the latest version of its framework for converting 3ds Max and Blender scenes into WebGL-based 3D web applications.
The update relaxes restrictions on physical materials and adds support for anisotropic texture filtering.
The 3ds Max edition also gets support for animated materials, UV transformations for texture maps, photometric lights, and characters created using Max’s Biped or CATRig rig types.
New for both 3ds Max and Blender: support for native physical materials
Changes common to both editions include support for the host application’s native physical materials, rather than just materials compliant with the PBR model used by the glTF standard.
In Blender, that means support for a range of key Cycles nodes, including the new Principled BSDF node introduced in Blender 2.79.
In 3ds Max, that means support for physical materials with any internal structure, making it possible to use any of 3ds Max’s internal material presets.
Users can choose to convert materials to a glTF 2.0-compatible format on export, for compatibility with other applications that support the standard.
Support for anisotropic texture filtering and updates to visual scripting
Other changes common to both editions include support for anisotropic texture filtering, and the option to use Unicode characters in filenames.
Puzzles, Verge3D’s visual scripting environment, gets new behaviours in which model parts can be dragged with the mouse, with options to set bending of attached soft bodies, or set constraints for the movements.
For 3ds Max only: support for material animation, photometric lights and Biped and CATRigs
The 3ds Max edition of the framework also gets support for material animation: users can animate the inputs to the Standard and Physical materials, and the Mix, RGB Multiply and Bitmap map parameters.
UV transformations are now supported for texture maps, minimising the need to adjust textures manually, or to bake them out. The update also adds support for photometric light sources.
In addition, Verge3D now supports skinning and animation for 3ds Max’s Biped and CATRig character rigs as well as individual bones, and animation export is now “significantly faster”.
Exported files are now “4-5x smaller [on] average”, reducing loading times for apps created in Verge3D.
Pricing and availability
Verge3D 2.5 is available for the current build of Blender and 3ds Max 2015 and above.
The software can be trialled for free: for production, a personal licence costs $290, a team licence costs $990, and an enterprise licence – which gets you source code access – costs $2,990.
Read a full list of new features in Verge3D 2.5 for 3ds Max on Soft8Soft’s website
Read a full list of new features in Verge3D 2.5 for Blender on Soft8Soft’s website