Hi Everyone,
We're happy to announce the "Father's Day" release of Blade3D. This build includes a brand new lighting system, some nice additions to the IDE and major performance tuning for BSP maps and the material system.
The new lighting system now supports 5 light types. Point light for light in all directions, directional light for light In a particular direction, and spot lights for light in a specific direction with a cone. The final two lights types are projected texture lights. Projected texture light projects a texture onto the scene in a specific direction, while projected cube texture light projects a texture in all directions, using a cube map.
To use the new lights all you have to do is add them to your scene, if a scene item is within range (each light has a range property), it will be lit by the light, when using a Lighting material.
Blade3D has no upper limit for the number of lights in the scene. With shader model 3.0, each object can be lit by 4 lights of each type, with up to 20 per object. With shader model 2.0, each object can be lit by 2 lights of each type, with up to 10 per object.
Enjoy!
Blade3D Team
Light manager for dynamic lighting, with:
Point Lights
Directional Lights
Spot Lights
Projected Texture Lights
Projected CubeTexture Lights
for
VertexLit
PixelLit
Blinn
Phong
LightMappedBlinn
Fix for tangents in Blinn and Pong effects.
Allow particle rotation.
Fixed material property override problem with loading models.
Fix for the force controllers not being shown for Active Rigid Body.
Merged skinning and non skinning effects into one.
New widgets for light objects
Effects now compiled in one place (edtor).
Effect defines for shader model.
Compiling effects in highest available profile.
New Extensibility support.
Added a TimedLerp which takes a property id as parameter.
Tab and TabBack for editors.
New release notes and error message dialogs.
Fix for color picker.
Additions to the Toolbars allow quick editing of the more commonly accessed properties. These include:
New toolbar controls such as sliders, scrub editors and textboxes
New Lighting panel.
Transform panel now contains controls to modify object transform .
Added global scene options on the Scene panel.
Insert Camera from toolbar.
Improved toolbar color pickers to reflect the selected color.
Support for binary HLSL files which are compiled in the IDE.
Effects are now structured into categories such as Image Processing, Environmental, Organics and more.
Added new Kaleidoscope, ElectroStatic Particle and Organic effects .
Effects now use multiple lighting passes.
Added support for multiple techniques in effects.
Performance improvements for material system.
Performance improvements for BSP maps.
Fix for BSP Curve rendering.
Add BSP to scene on import.
Fixed spatial LookAt.
Added LookAtSpeed property to control how reactive the LookAt constraint is.
Improved scene grid.
Added TimedLerp() for scripting.
Preserve line numbers in script and hlsl for easier code navigation.
Fix package importer to work with new schema layout for effects.
Fix some selection issues.
Fix bug in static mesh drawing code causing model positions to not be updated.
Added SculptedPrim.
Fixed selection material when selecting model mesh parts or materials.
Changes to Transform properties of spatial items, now split into two parts,
LocalTransform and WorldTransform with sub properties.
Added Blade3DLogo sample texture (default for projective texture lights).
Now save effect in the HLSLEditor with F12 (like script( instead of on a timer.
Splash screen progress bar.
Fix for normal maps getting overridden to a default texture.
Fix for Camera's overwriting each others frustum planes.