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Major release 5.0.0: updated engine, improved support for X3D 4.0, MD3, saving to STL, tool renames and more
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@michaliskambi michaliskambi released this 20 May 21:11
· 47 commits to master since this release
v5.0.0
7990e4a

We're proud to announce a new major version of Castle Model Viewer, previously known as view3dscene. This is a major release, with a lot of new features and improvements. The viewer is a tool to view 3D and 2D models, and it is powered by the Castle Game Engine.

Along with the viewer, we also release new version of Castle Model Converter (formerly tovrmlx3d), a command-line tool to convert models between various formats.

New features:

  • A ton of fixes and optimizations coming from using new Castle Game Engine 7.0-alpha3 (which will be officially released soon as well). Some highlights:

    • Default fonts include a lot of common Unicode characters, so rendering text in local language in most cases will now just work "out of the box".
    • MD3 support improvements: multiple animations supported (we load animation.cfg), so playing particular MD3 animations is trivial. Optimized loading. Choosing skins. Support for tags.
    • X3D 4.0 support improvements, e.g. proper MetadataXxx containerField handling for both X3D 4 and 3, added new X3D 4.0 fields to various nodes.
    • We changed our strategy to deal with name duplicates on input (like non-unique names in glTF content). We now rename non-unique node names on input (like glTF) to be unique on output (to guarantee to make valid X3D from valid input glTF). See docs: glTF files may have non-unique names, but we advise to generate them to be unique; eventually we'll force them unique at loading. See also more details in the What to do with node names when importing e.g. glTF?. And see demo of glTF including in X3D: avocado_and_exports.
    • Faster on modern systems, due to using only modern rendering features
    • Reliable on older systems, due to better tested "fallback mode" on old OpenGL workings
    • Fixes for shaders on older ATI GPUs

  • Prettier panel icons and buttons

  • Improved menu items to edit materials - you can now reset material, and create any material type (physical, unlit, Phong)

  • New converter options:

    • Option to only validate
    • Read from stdin (with optionally providing the base URL to resolve relative URLs)
    • Configure output float precision
    • 2nd parameter to specify output file name (optional; if you still want to save to stdout, you can influence output type using --stdout-url)
    • Option to save to STL (binary) (also available in our online converter )

Please support us on Patreon if you find our tool useful. Thank you!

If you find any issues with our tools, please report them using GitHub issues, or just talk to us on forum, Discord or other places.

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