Babylon.js v2.5

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This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Channel 9.

Last month, one of our favorite 3D JavaScript libraries was updated, v2.5 of Babylon.js rolled out to the world...

Here's the announcement post from David Catuhe.

Babylon.js v2.5 and what’s next?

"Last week we released Babylon.js v2.5. I do not want to catalog here all features we stuffed this version with but instead I would like to underline some really cool ones.

I will also present here non core features that are worth a try.

But before going to the specifics of this article I would like to celebrate the use of Babylon.js as rendering engine in www.remix3d.com.

Babylon.js was also use by Neo Pangea and National Geographics in two multimedia experiences:

And now let’s talk about great stuff that came with v2.5.

Highlight your world

Sebastien Vandenberghe (one of our core developer) worked on a system to allow developers to highlight specific meshes in your scene: The HighlightLayer.

This tool can be used to produced smooth and nice glow effects around your objects:

image

...

Rendering special effects with the StandardRenderingPipeline

Julien Moreau-Mathis (another core contributor) created the StandardRenderingPipeline which is a set of postprocess effects that can be used to simulate real world effects like lens flare, depth of field or advanced illumination effects:

image

...

Build your own Babylon.js

Simplicity is the foundation of Babylon.js and we struggle everyday to keep it our main objective. This is why the framework tries to provide all core services in one single file.

But to avoid bloating it with tons of optional features we also provide additional services available through various .js files.

This is the case for instance for additional materials or post processes.

In order to make them more discoverable, we created the Babylon.js Version Builder page: http://www.babylonjs.com/versionBuilder/

...

Introducing the Babylon.js editor

Julien Moreau-Mathis also worked on a complete WYSIWYG editor for Babylon.js: http://editor.babylonjs.com/

image

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The DebugLayer is dead. Long live the Inspector

Julian Chenard (Once again a core contributor) spent a lot of time revamping the good old DebugLayer.

The DebugLayer is an internal HTML layer that you can activate on any scene using scene.debugLayer.show().

The display UI can help you debug a scene but giving you control over engine features. You can then turn on/off specific channels, display bounding boxes and much more.

The only problem was that the UI was not really responsive nor really modern (ok let’s admit it was awful):

...

Using Visual Studio Code to contribute to Babylon.js

I used to use Visual Studio to develop Babylon.js. But after the release of Visual Studio Code, I was really interested to move our pipeline to this smaller (and faster) IDE.

This is now done thanks to Sebastien who wrote a really convenient gulp scripts to build all the library in a VS Code compatible way.

In a nutshell, after forking and cloning Babylon.js repo, you are 3 minutes await from being able to test and debug.

...

Call to action

As a conclusion, I would like to give you some pointers about Babylon.js:

..." [Click through to read the post, see all the pics and source code snips]

Here's a snap of the release notes;

v2.5.0

"Major updates
  • New StandardRenderingPipeline effect to support screen space lens flare and depth of field. Demo - (Julien Moreau-Mathis)
  • New HighlightLayer object to enable highlights rendering. Demo - (sebavan)
  • Babylon.js now supports right handed system with scene.useRightHandedSystem = true (deltakosh)
  • Babylon.js is now compiled with optimize-js to get faster initial load (deltakosh)
  • Canvas2D moved to a separate folder in main repo. Now you need to also include babylon.cavans2d.js to get Canvas@D feature (deltakosh)
  • New BoneIKController Demo (abow)
  • New BoneLookController Demo (abow)
  • You can now build your own version of babylon.js with gulp build-custom Doc - (deltakosh)
Updates

..." [Read them all here]