Changelog

2024-04-15 - Shapespark 3.0.5

• Support for SketchUp 2024.
• Added option to clone camera volumes.
• Implemented dragging of items in ordered lists (drag and drop).
• Allow selection of text in the editor, for instance, to copy the material or object's name.
• Fixed darkening of metallic objects (caused by additional shadowing factor for reflections).
• Fixed 3ds Max export crash for out-of-bounds material IDs.

2024-04-08 - Shapespark 3.0.4

• Sketchup exporter can now export directly to Shapespark cloud.
• Fixed water material.
• Fixed wrong serialization of chroma keys in video materials.
• Fixed camera volumes being visible in wrong modes.

2024-04-04 - Shapespark 3.0.3

• Introduced dark mode to editor UI.
• Added walking (fpp) camera mode to view modes selector.
• Improved UV transform: accepting negative offset & scale.
• Improved reflections quality in shadowed areas.
• Fixed cloned views modifications changing also original view's state.
• Fixed undoing of removal of items causing a change in the items position.
• Fixed invalid colors on bright scenes when tone mapping is used.
• Fixed aliasing of textures newly imported in the editor.
• Fixed rare hangs during scene loading.
• Fixed dark lines which rarely showed up on lightmaps.
• Fixed gizmo misbehaving in orthogonal view mode.
• Made the gizmo visible during transformations.
• Fixed slow removal of views on scenes with large number of objects.
• Multiple minor improvements in the UI.
• Fixed camera volume not disappearing after removal.
• Spawning new camera volume trigger in front of the camera.
• Fixed issue with baking not working when temp folder path contained non-ascii characters.

2024-03-15 - Shapespark 3.0.2 - a bugfix release

• Fixed problem with saving state of views.
• Fixed minor UI issues in Revit & Sketchup exporters.

2024-03-14 - Shapespark 3.0.1 - a bugfix release

• Fixed loading issues on some scenes with custom HTML.
• Fixed broken 'Set current' button for orbit and top view.
• Fixed broken baking on scenes with invalid vertex position data.

2024-03-13 - Shapespark 3.0.0

• Modernized editor interface.
• Introduced history which allows to undo (using CTRL-Z) and redo (using CTRL-Y or CTRL-SHIFT-Z) actions done in the editor.
• Separated view mode from current editor tab.
• Added opaque wireframe rendering mode.
• Added new viewing modes: top, front, side, orthogonal.
• Introduced mobile performance warning for larger scenes in the editor.
• Fixed issues with video textures on chrome, caused by power saving modes.
• Fixed wrong behaviour when shifting views.
• Fixed wrong placement of MaterialPicker in VR.
• Several minor fixes in lightmap baking quality when degenerate geometry is present.

2024-01-12 - Shapespark 2.9.7 - a bugfix release

• Fixed another issue with non-Latin paths breaking imports, uploads, baking (introduced in 2.9.5).
• Fixed an issue with lines showing on lightmaps on some scenes imported from SketchUp.

2024-01-11 - Shapespark 2.9.6 - a bugfix release

• Fixed an issue with non-Latin paths breaking imports, uploads, baking (introduced in 2.9.5).
• Fixed bounding boxes for camera volumes and light probes being barely visible.
• Fixed an issue with UVs being removed for meshes which use textures, when given mesh had multiple instances and one of them didn’t use a texture.

2024-01-10 - Shapespark 2.9.5

• Modernized the dashboard user interface.
• Fixed auto-path not finding correctly paths on certain simplified scenes.
• Introduced filtering option in the object tree in object tab.
• Introduced greater adjustability of the camera volume triggers for certain extensions. For HTML Label, Audio, Material Picker, Video texture Control, Meeting Projection Screen, Video Stream it is now possible to specify that upon entering or exiting the volume the extensions should either activate, deactivate or change to the other state.
• Viewer user interface localization for the Finnish language.
• Fixed material pickers spheres being wrongly placed in VR mode.
• Allow adding hover callbacks using onNodeTypeHoverChanged for Anchors added through the API.
• Fix Revit exporter not to change light names on subsequent exports during one Revit session. This caused Shapespark light settings to be lost on a scene update.

2023-11-07 - Shapespark 2.9.4

• Introduced anti-tiling methods for materials. This may help the materials look more natural by avoiding visible repetition.
• Fixed an issue with simplification causing the scene not to load. This could happen when importing a scene to Shapespark or when choosing higher levels of simplification.

2023-11-02 - Shapespark 2.9.3 - a bugfix release

• Fixed an issue with wrong error messages when uploading scenes to the cloud.
• Fixed an issue when removing objects in switch object extension causing them to hide in the editor.
• Fixed issues with material picker misbehaving when used with a camera volume trigger.
• Fixed an issue causing reflective materials to appear black on certain VR devices.
• Fixed the inability of adding a trigger to the meeting projection screen extension.

2023-10-24 - Shapespark 2.9.2

• Introduced mesh simplification with multiple levels, exposed in the object tab. Mesh simplification level can be applied globally or per node. Depending on the scene, mesh simplification can provide up to a 70% reduction in triangle count and mesh buffer size. This increases rendering performance, reduces loading time, and allows scenes to be viewed on lower-end devices.
• Added Light Probe cloning option in the editor.
• Fixed issue with invalid reflections in mirrors.
• Fixed problem with scenes which used custom index.html. Now, they don’t have to be updated to work properly.
• Introduced camera volume as another type of trigger for all extensions. It is triggered when the camera enters a cube or a sphere and can be used, for instance, to trigger a sound when entering a room.
• Fixed issues with loading scenes on iOS17.
• Fixed issues with video feed distortion in meetings.

2023-09-21 - Shapespark 2.9.1 - a bugfix release

• Fixed lightmap glitches showing up on non-reflective surfaces on some scenes.

2023-09-18 - Shapespark 2.9.0

• Upgrade Cycles rendering engine to version 3.5:
  • Almost 2 times faster baking & previews on CUDA & CPU devices.
  • Added support for OptiX device, available on Nvidia RTX GPUs, which is about 3 times faster on average than CUDA in previous releases.
• Improved lightmap denoising & encoding performance.
• Fixed ambient light (it no longer behaves like ambient occlusion).
• Decreased amount of glitches in the lightmap in the areas with duplicated faces.
• Fixed clipping out of the scene when descending from a high ledge.
• Fixed some baking & denoising artifacts.
• Fixed high saturation artifacts showing up in dark areas with color mapping enabled (bug introduced in version 2.8.2).
• Fixed lightmaps being pixelated on close-up.
• Fixed HSL correction not being applied in lightmap baking.
• Light probes are now blended: more than one light probe can affect a single mesh.
• Improved blending of cutout materials.
• Added option to change cutout mode for materials with alpha-blended textures.
• Added gizmo support for point lights with IES profile.

2023-07-14 - Shapespark 2.8.4 - a bugfix release

• Fixed incorrect rendering of material colors in material picker after the scene is baked.

2023-07-13 - Shapespark 2.8.3 - a bugfix release

• Fixed scene update failing for a scene that already has a lightmap baked.

2023-07-12 - Shapespark 2.8.2

• Motion blur. This effect blurs the image when the camera moves, which helps to make the motion perception more natural. It is available in the Camera tab.
• Scene assets size reduction leading to shorter scene opening time: lightmaps size reduced by about 40%, geometry data size reduced by about 25%.
• Made camera movement smoother on surfaces with holes like, for example, wooden piers. The camera no longer drops into the holes.
• Fixed scene cover images to show only the first object of each Switch Object extension. Previously, the cover images included all the objects switched between.

2023-06-19 - Shapespark 2.8.1

• Experimental support for baking on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture GPUs, including the RTX 40xx family graphics cards.
• Make HSL correction of base color textures accurate to widen the applicable correction range. Previously, the correction was approximated which led to incorrect results in some cases.
• Fix a bug introduced in version 2.8.0 that caused texture atlas generation to fail for some scenes, leading to "failed to generate web textures" error during scene upload or bundle.

2023-06-09 - Shapespark 2.8.0

• Grass material: new material type that gives an authentic grass appearance.
• PBR specular reflections: improve rendering specular reflections by applying Physically-Based Rendering interpretation of roughness and metallic settings. Now, these settings impact in Shapespark should be more consistent with analogous settings in other 3D tools.
• Tone mapping and contrast presets: the Camera tab now offers a few tone mapping and contrast presets, providing better control over the tonal range of the scene.
• Color mapping: the Camera tab also offers a list of predefined color maps that users can choose from, for example: cool, sepia or grayscale, to give the scene a particular tone.
• Scene size indicators with warnings if the scene is likely too large for lower end devices. The indicators are available in the Objects tab.
• Make setting up sun position in the Lights tab easier by displaying the sun direction as an arrow pointed to the center of the scene.
• Make the default sun color more warm and the default sky color more cool to improve the natural lighting realism.
• Precise setting of the view position: the camera position can be now adjusted in the View tab with numeric input fields.
• Display warning about materials that are used by an extension but that are no longer present in the scene.
• Improve meeting connection preflight test to detect another type of critical connection issues.
• Support for Revit 2024.
• Support for 3ds Max 2024.
• Fix the issue of MP4 video textures not playing on iOS 16, which caused scene loading to never finish.
• Fix ambient occlusion producing too dark edges where surfaces meet.
• Fix custom trigger images not working for bundled scenes.
• Fix material picker not opening if it contains a missing material.
• Fix end of meeting in case of network connection problems to consistently disconnect the participant from all sides of the meeting.
• Fix 3ds Max exporter removing light IES profiles added in the Shapespark scene editor.
• Fix the desktop application being blocked for a team member when the member has an own expired subscription.

2023-01-26 - Shapespark 2.7.0

• Improved ambient occlusion. Ambient occlusion is now a separate feature from ambient light, and is applied to the total light a surface receives, not only to the ambient part of the light, which makes the effect much more visible. Furthermore, the intensity of ambient occlusion can be controlled with the Intensity setting.
• Fog. The Sky tab has new settings allowing to enable fog effect in the scene and control the fog color, density and distance from the camera.
• Protected scenes. An uploaded scene can now be made protected, in which case Shapespark generates a secret that must be included in the scene URL for the scene to be opened. Knowing a scene name or having a public scene URL is insufficient to open a protected scene.
• Custom icons on extension triggers. Trigger configuration now offers the possibility to upload a custom icon in addition to selecting one from the pre-defined list.
• Interaction prompt. The prompt is an animated banner shown after the scene has been loaded to indicate that the scene is interactive. It can be enabled in the Viewer tab.
• Video meeting improvements:
  • Custom avatars in 3D meetings. Such avatars can be configured in collaboration with the Shapespark team and are available only in the Premium plan. More details can be found in the announcement
  • Synchronize scene changes made with the Switch objects extension between meeting participants.
  • Use Simulcast technique to adapt video resolution to the participants' internet connection bandwidth.
  • Limit the size of the participant list and make it scrollable to make the user interface less crowded on small screens.
• Allow to disable panning in the orbit mode. The Orbit mode settings now include a checkbox for this.
• Exporters' improvements fixes:
  • Export SketchUp group name as Shapespark object type name.
  • Export SketchUp component instance name in addition to component definition name. The Shapespark object type name is now created from joining the two names.
  • Prevent light names conflicts when Shapespark lights are copied between SketchUp models.
  • Fix removing a material map in 3ds Max not being applied to a Shapespark scene on scene update.
• Make video textures added in the editor tile if they are of power-of-two dimensions.
• Block exporting a scene from SketchUp, Revit or 3ds Max exporter if there is already some operation, eg. bake, in progres for the scene. This prevents simultaneous scene modifications that could potentially lead to scene corruption.
• Add viewer API functions for VR mode management:
  • Viewer.vrEnabled - checks if the VR mode is enabled,
  • Viewer.enableVr - enables the VR mode,
  • Viewer.disableVr - disables the VR mode.
• Cloud editor leaves beta.

2022-10-28 - Shapespark 2.6.2 - a bugfix release

• Make the SketchUp exporter include light roll (rotation around the lighting direction). This enables adjusting ligjt roll in SketchUp for lights that are later changed into non-axially symmetric in Shapespark, for example: an area light, or a point light with an IES profile.
• Fix looking around using keyboard that was broken in the previous release.

2022-10-24 - Shapespark 2.6.1

• Improvements for troubleshooting meeting issues:
  • Connection quality indicator. The meeting control panel now includes a three-level quality indicator showing the current quality of the meeting connection.
  • Meeting connection preflight test. The viewer performs a short connection tests before the participant joins the meeting to detect critical connection issues, for example a firewall blocking the connection.
• Exclusive option for audio/video-related extensions. The Audio, VideoTextureControl and VideoStream extension have a new option Exclusive that allows only one exclusive extension to be playing at a given moment. If an exclusive extension is playing while the visitor clicks a trigger of another exclusive extension, the playing one is paused.
• Look around smoothing for walk views controlled with a mouse or touchscren.
• Several fixes and improvements to automatic camera path computation, including:
  • Improve path precision when there are large non-colliding background objects in the scene, for example a custom sky sphere or planes with 2D images of the surrounding.
  • Fix teleport executed through the viewer API not being instant for maxTime = 0.
• Fix cutout textures not being detected when imported in the scene editor. This led to inconsistent texture look between the edit and view modes.
• Fix type of imported lights being impossible to change because of the linked property 🔗 not reacting to clicks.
• Fix performance problems in scenes where visibility of large hierarchies of objects was controlled by the Switch objects extension.
• Fix desktop application not remembering the folder of the last selected file for model or texture import. The issue occured only on some systems where Shapespark was installed long-time ago.
• Fix inconsistent font use in the desktop application.

2022-09-13 - Shapespark 2.6.0

• Cloud editor (beta). You can now edit and bake scenes directly in the cloud, by using the cloud version of the Shapespark editor. More details can be found in the announcement.
• Support for 3ds Max 2023.
• Automatic camera path calculation to avoid passing through obstacles when switching between views and navigating with the minimap. The feature is enabled by default for new scenes, and for existing scenes enable it with the Auto path option in the Camera tab.
• Material UV transformation. Allow to configure UV scale and offset for a material to adjust the UV mapping.
• The Lights and Objects tabs now allow you to select multiple items and edit properties of all the selected items at once. The Materials tab already had support for multi-edition, but this version enhances the feature by making multiple materials selectable also by clicking in the editor viewport.
• Minimap improvements and fixes:
  • Allow to set model rotation in the minimap.
  • Anti-alias the minimap image.
• Allow to set the minimum and maximum camera distance for orbit and top views.
• Add fixed camera height mode that maintains constant height above objects with Walk on option enabled. The Camera height option becomes available in the Camera tab after enabling Auto climb.
• Allow to copy text color between anchors in the color picker.
• Allow to automatically rewind Audio extension or video texture tracks each time the track is played.
• Allow to share audio track together with the screen track during a 3D meeting screen sharing. The feature is supported only in the Chrome browser.
• Show Meeting projection screen trigger also in the editor to simplify the trigger positioning.
• Fix material picker texture application issue in the editor for repeating textures.
• Fix material picker 3D meeting state synchronization issue that led to meeting interruptions.
• Fix light markers flickering in the scene editor on certain platforms.
• Viewer API improvements:
  • Allow to enable/disable minimap.
  • Allow to register multiple listeners by Viewer.onNodeTypeClicked.

2022-05-13 - Shapespark 2.5.3

• Multi-material edition. The Material tab now allows to select multiple materials and edit properties of all the selected materials at once.
• Revit exporter improvements and fixes:
  • Strip numbers that Revit adds automatically to linked model names. Now, if a model is linked a few times in a project, all links use the same name in Shapespark.
  • Fix an imported CAD model being rendered black when the Mirror transformation is used on the model.
  • Fix failing export if a Revit project contains a model group without any exportable elements.
• Use WebGL2 on iOS devices. Viewer on iOS device can now leverage centroid sampling to reduce lightmap aliasing artifacts. WebGL2 had already been used by other platforms.
• Fix double-clicking in the editor viewport not navigating to the clicked point. The double-click navigation was broken in the previous release.
• Expose global variables corresponding to URL hash viewer options. The global variables can be modified from custom JavasScript code (for example placed in a body-end.html):
  • WALK.FLIP_MOUSE corresponds to #flipmouse,
  • WALK.AUTO_PLAY corresponds to #autoplay,
  • WALK.HIDE_PLAY corresponds to #hideplay,
  • WALK.SHOW_HELP_ON_LOAD corresponds to #help,
  • WALK.GAZE_IN_POINTER_LOCK corresponds to #gazeinpointerlock,
  • WALK.NO_GAZE_TELEPORT corresponds to #nogazeteleport,
  • WALK.VR_LO corresponds to #vrlo,
  • WALK.VR_HI corresponds to #vrhi,
  • WALK.MOBILE_HI corresponds to #mobilehi.

2022-04-22 - Shapespark 2.5.2

• Stereo panorama. The screenshot function now allows to generate stereoscopic 360 panoramas in addition to regular flat panoramas.
• Allow to crop the minimap to an area relevant for the scene visitor. This allows the minimap to focus on the interior and ignore the exterior objects.
• Allow to copy color from a scene element in the color picker. The color is copied between the same scene element types: light color picker allows to copy color from another light, material color picker allows to copy color from another material, and trigger color picker from another trigger.
• Revit exporter improvements:
  • Support for Revit model groups. A model group is exported as a hierarchical Shapespark object: the group becomes a parent object and group elements become the object's children.
  • Support for Revit 2023.
• Make the camera auto-climb speed adapt to the horizontal camera speed. This prevents the auto-climb function from walking into a wall on a steep staircase.
• Replace Noto Sans font with Open Sans in the viewer and editor UI. Include the Vietnamese character subset in the font.
• Fix number input controls in the editor to allow entering negative values from the keyboard.
• Allow to configure the object rotation speed with greater precision (0.001 revolutions per second).
• Fix extension configuration issues when trigger properties were changed while the trigger position was not set yet. Such issues led to scene corruption if the scene with broken extension configuration was saved.
• Fix load error when a scene is opened in an Android app which has a built-in browser, for example: Facebook Messenger or WeChat.

2022-03-11 - Shapespark 2.5.1

• Support multiple levels in the minimap.
• Rotating objects. The editor offers Rotate option in the Objects tab which makes all objects of the given type continuously spin around.
• List of views for the Custom hide in views option now has an Add all button that adds all the views to the list.
• Improve AI denoiser performance for long and thin geometry elements.
• Fix HTML label horizontal centering on iPhone X.
• Remove the orange outline of the editor's viewport that started to appear in the previous version.

2022-02-25 - Shapespark 2.5.0

• Minimap showing current camera position and helping to navigate in the scene. It uses a 2D floorplan automatically generated from the 3D model. The minimap can be enabled and configured in the new Shapespark editor Minimap tab.
• MultiTrigger extension allowing to trigger multiple extensions with one action. For example: the new extension can be used to change the view and show an HTML label with a single trigger click.
• Allow to clone views.
• Allow to clone light instances. A light instance can be now created in two ways: by cloning existing instance or adding a new instance in the current camera position.
• Reduce AI-based denoiser artifacts around bright/dark edges. More improvements are in progress, aimed at reducing artifacts on small or thin geometries.
• Fix texture's Auto scale resolution setting being ignored in some cases.
• Viewer translation corrections for the French language.
• Chromium browser underlying the desktop application has been upgraded to version 98.

2022-01-24 - Shapespark 2.4.1 - a bugfix release

• Fix an error in downloading a scene from the Shapespark hosting causing the download to fail.
• Change the editor's illumination preview key from r to i to avoid starting the preview accidentally when navigating the scene using the wasd keys.

2022-01-19 - Shapespark 2.4

• Show an indicator in which place a click triggered movement will finish.
• Integrate AI-based denoiser which is much more effective at removing noise. The new denoiser significantly improves shadow contrasts, and allows to reduce the baking time by lowering the number of samples. The new denoiser can be turned on with the AI-based denoiser (beta) option. It is in beta stage, for scenes with detailed geometry, in particular containing long thin elements, it can introduce denoising artifacts.
• Allow to choose the viewer UI language from the following set: English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish.
• Allow to download a scene from the Shapespark hosting to the desktop application.
• Add name filter to scene list and allow to order the scenes in the list by their modification time.
• Do not apply HTML customizations (head-end.html, body-end.html, index.html) when the scene is opened in the editor. This prevents scene structure changes made with custom JavaScript code from being saved in the scene, potentially leading to scene corruption.
• Allow to start the illumination preview from any tab of the scene editor by pressing the r key.
• Add a new light instance in the same place as the currently selected instance instead of in the current camera position.
• Increase keyboard walking speed when SHIFT key is pressed.
• Support for zero camera speed to block the camera movement.
• Add a 3D caption inside the scene play button to emphasize that the content is an interactive 3D experience, not a video.
• When joining a meeting, instead of opening a new browser tab with Terms of Service or Privacy Policy, display these documents directly in the join dialog.
• Display a message suggesting to use the native web browser if a scene fails to load in the web browser built into the Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp mobile apps.
• Introduce a workaround for iOS 15.1 bug causing the browser to crash when joining a meeting using H264 streams.
• Fix long import time for scenes with thousands of identical meshes.
• 3ds Max exporter fixes:
  • Do not fail the export on unresolved texture files.
  • Fix support for textures in .tx format which got broken in Shapespark 2.3.4.
• Add Viewer.openPopup API function to open an HTML pop-up from JavaScript code.

2021-09-17 - Shapespark 2.3.6 - a bugfix release

• Fix duplicated meshes rendered black after baking. The issue was introduced in 2.3.4 by an optimization to bake only one duplicate from a set of duplicated meshes placed exactly in the same position. It turned out that such duplicates are common in user scenes, so the optimization was reverted.
• Fix bundles not working in certain self-hosting environments.

2021-09-13 - Shapespark 2.3.5

• Fix views defined in the editor being removed when the scene is updated from an FBX, DAE or OBJ file.

2021-09-10 - Shapespark 2.3.4

• Allow to rename and make copies of scenes from the desktop application main window.
• HTML Label extension improvements: options to center the label horizontally and vertically and to disable the HTML content padding. Animate opening and closing of the label.
• In the orbit view zoom to the mouse/touch pointer instead of zooming to the orbit center.
• 3D meetings: allow to select camera and microphone devices while joining a meeting.
• Fix uploading and bundling for scenes with sky being the only texture used by the scene.
• 3ds Max exporter fixes:
  • Fix failure for missing IES files and for non-ASCII IES filenames.
  • Fix handling of invalid texture in color channel of VRayLight material.

2021-06-16 - Shapespark 2.3.3

• New example-room scene, prettier and more spacious.
• Fix lightmap compression related artifacts that were present in some scenes starting from Shapespark 2.3.
• Fix bake error for the included example-room scene.
• Make SketchUp export tolerate broken textures. If a texture cannot be exported from SketchUp, the material is exported as solid red and the export process doesn't fail.
• Fix bundling scenes for self-hosting to be compatible with web servers using Brotli compression.

2021-05-26 - Shapespark 2.3.2 - a bugfix release

• Fix numerous issues in the extension editor. Changing the extension type is no longer allowed for an existing extension.
• Fix opening the trigger editor resetting the trigger position and requiring setting it again.
• Fix CUDA baking artifacts appearing as solid color stains on certain polygons.
• Fix removing the view to refresh the view list in the editor.
• Fix texture atlasing not to break scenes containing a texture which is used both as a base color and another texture type (eg. bump).
• Make scene cleanup remove no longer used video textures.
• 3ds Max exporter fixes:
  • Fix export failures for models containing multiple textures with non-default Output map parameters.
  • Prevent merging a 3ds Max model into the current model from changing the Shapespark scene name suggested for the export.

2021-05-20 - Shapespark 2.3.1

• Fix registering the 3ds Max exporter plug-in for 3ds Max 2022 and the Revit exporter add-in for Revit 2022.

2021-05-19 - Shapespark 2.3

• Use WebP format to store lightmaps. Reduces lightmap transfer size by about 50%.
• Use Brotli compressor for geometry buffers. Reduces geometry transfer size by 10-25%.
• Upgrade Cycles rendering engine to 2.92.
  • Improves baking performance by 10-20%.
  • Improves utilization of multi-GPU devices with different GPU models. Unlike in the previous versions, mixing GPUs of different performance speeds up baking.
  • Reduces memory usage while baking scenes with multiple lightmaps or with many objects using the Isolate shadows option.
• Improve frame-rate for scenes with complex geometries by optimizing vertices order. Such optimization leads to more efficient GPU memory access patterns.
• Upgrade Basis compressor to version 1.13. Improves texture compression speed 2-3 times leading to shorter scene uploads.
• sRGB and HSL modes in the editor color picker.
• Filters to facilitate finding materials and extensions in the editor.
• GPU compressed formats and Auto scale resolution settings intended to improve quality of key textures in a scene (for example, art works in virtual galleries) at the expense of larger texture size.
• A new Video stream extension to attach a HLS video stream to a texture.
• Decrease the step of the emissive material strength to 0.1. Allows making subtle material-based light sources, like displays or dimly glowing lamps. Low emission strength can also be used as a trick to make a material appear a bit brighter.
• Allow configuring text color of triggers.
• Use WebGL2 and centroid sampling on devices that support it to reduce lightmap aliasing artifacts.
• Allow using assets stored in the scene extra-assets directory from the HTML Label extension and head-end.html/body-end.html files. For example, an HTML Label can use a logo.png image from the extra-assets directory with an HTML code like: <img src="$EXTRA_ASSTES/logo.png">
• Allow configuring geometry quantization with vertexAccuracy parameter in config.json. Higher accuracy improves geometry quality for high resolution, detailed models at the expense of larger geometry size.
• Two new icons for triggers: search and expand.
• Fix for videos being muted in some cases even though they were configured to play with sound.
• 3ds Max exporter improvements:
  • Support 3ds Max 2022.
  • Shorten export times by improving the textures processing performance and introducing texture cache reusable between exports. The cache can be cleared with the new Clear exporter cache item in the Shapespark menu.
  • Support Opacity Map.
  • Support metallic channel.
  • Support Physical Material's Cutout Map.
  • Fixed a crash when trying to export a scene with too long name.
• Make Revit exporter support Revit 2022.
• 3D meetings improvements:
  • Camera and microphone preview and test page before joining a meeting.
  • A more visible laser pointer that meeting participants can use to draw other participants' attention to places in the meeting space.
  • A visual indicator of who is speaking in the meeting.
  • A button to leave the meeting.
  • Rotate avatar head if the meeting participant's camera is in a portrait mode.
  • Detect collisions between avatars.
• JavaScript API improvements:
  • Allow toggling help popup through the JavaSript API.

2021-02-12 - Shapespark 2.2

• Meeting improvements:
  • An option to limit the number of participant minutes a given meeting can use.
  • Autoplay a scene when opened as a meeting.
  • Display a message when the meeting has ended.
  • Improve the layout of the join dialog on mobile devices.
• 3ds Max exporter improvements:
  • Various enhancements to V-Ray and Scanline material and light conversion.
  • Support bitmaps in the .tx format.
  • More detailed export summary. In particular, if a problematic map is encountered the summary shows which material uses the map.
  • Fix suggested scene name for the export dialog not to be cleared when 3ds Max auto-saves the file.
  • Export lights with the same name as instances of a single light.
  • Stability improvements.
• A Switch objects extension to toggle visibility in a set of objects so that only one object is visbile at a time. To prevent the switchable objects from casting shadows on the surroundings or each other combine the extension with the Isolate shadows option.
• An option to limit the horizontal rotation in the orbit mode to a given angle range.
• Change pan gesture in the orbit mode require two fingers instead of three on touch screen devices.
• Enable the user to switch the Shapespark account by clicking the user icon in the desktop application.
• Support reordering lists of items (eg. materials to pick from) in an extension configuration dialog.
• For scenes using video textures fix the editor requesting a save of a scene after the Material has been entered even if no changes to the scene had been made.
• Fix the Video Texture Control extension not to fail on a missing material.
• Rename faces to triangles in the editor.

2020-12-21 - Shapespark 2.1.1

• Fix author logo image and Audio extension track not working after being imported from a local file.

2020-12-18 - Shapespark 2.1.0

• Meeting improvements:
  • Prettier 3D avatars.
  • Meeting projection screen extension allowing the meeting participants to share computer screens on surfaces in the 3D scene.
  • Always use the front camera on mobile devices with front and rear cameras.
• 3ds Max exporter improvements:
  • Support for light instances.
  • Support for mesh instances.
  • Export only the objects which are currently shown in 3ds Max.
  • Show unsupported and ignored 3ds Max entities when the export finishes.
  • Various enhancements to the material and light conversion.
• Support importing author logo image and Audio extension track from a local file instead of using a remote URL.
• Support renaming of lights added in the editor.
• Support for uploading and hosting user's own static files placed in the extra-assets subdirectory of the scene directory.
• Fix slow loading of scenes with several longer videos.
• Fix Video Texture Control failing to pause a video if the progressive loader was enabled.
• Fix objects with shared geometry being rendered black on iPhone 12.
• Pause video textures when an HTML label is opened only if the HTML label contains a video or iframe element. This prevents static labels from pausing video textures.
• Fix taking screenshots not working if the temporary directory was cleaned while the Shapespark desktop application has been running.

2020-11-21 - Shapespark 2.0.1

• 3ds Max exporter improvements and fixes:
  • Significant speedup of the export process.
  • Fix export failure for models with single-material objects being the only child of the parent.
  • Fix material names being exported with different suffixes in subsequent exporter runs. This prevented correct merging of properties set in Shapespark with the properties coming from 3ds Max.
• Fix upload error for scenes containing files of unrecognized content type in the `extra-assets` directory. Such files are now ignored.

2020-11-13 - Shapespark 2.0.0

• Video meetings within the 3D scenes allowing simultaneous visitors to see where each other are in the 3D space and talk using their devices' microphones and cameras. Available in the Standard and Plus subscription plans and for the perpetual license. See the announcement for more details.
• Teams: a Shapespark account can make subscriptions payments for several users and allow these users to upload scenes to the main account. Teams are available in the Standard and Plus subscription plans. See the announcement for more details.
• 3ds Max exporter plug-in enabling direct export from 3ds Max to Shapespark without the need to use an intermediate 3D file format. The exporter reads basic properties from both Standard (Scanline) and V-Ray materials.
• Scene objects can be configured to always face the camera. This enables using sprites/billboards in the scene or adding custom extension triggers that rotate to be always directed towards the camera.
• Support for baking on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs, including the RTX 30xx family graphics cards.
• Revit exporter improvements:
  • Export door objects with collisions disabled by default.
  • Export the Revit's active perspective 3D view as the initial view in the Shapespark scene.
• Added meta description tag to the scene's index.html to make the scene appearances in web searches more descriptive and user-friendly.
• Default styling for links in HTML labels.
• Fix unmuted video textures not being played when the scene is loaded with #autoplay. Such textures start to play when the visitor makes a first interaction with the scene.
• Pause video textures when an HTML label is opened and resume them when it's closed. This is a workaround for low Chrome & Edge performance when hardware video decoding is used at the same time the GPU is occupied with 3D rendering. Previously HTML labels containing videos made the scene unresponsive in these browsers.
• Fix sprite extension triggers being captured by light probes.
• Worked around z-fighting issues in Safari on certain Mac hardware configurations.
• Fix baking for scenes where all baked objects have isolated shadows.

2020-09-17 - Shapespark 1.17.2

• Revit exporter improvements:
  • Convert Revit light color temperature to Shapespark light color.
  • Convert Revit light intensity to Shapespark light strength. For now the conversion supports only spherical & spot light distributions.
  • Fix exporting rotation for Revit lights with photometric (IES) distribution.
  • Improve accuracy of metallic and roughness properties conversion.
  • Fix certain transparent materials being exported as non-transparent.
  • Make Shapespark object type/light name include also the Revit family name, in addition to the Revit type name.
  • Skip exporting level indicators.
• Increase reflection sharpness in the [0; 0.1] roughness range.
• Reduce memory usage for scenes having multiple triggers with the same text or icon.
• Do not use PVRTC compressed textures for HDR skies because the compression introduces significant artifacts.
• Pause video textures when the scene webpage becomes hidden, and resume them when the webpage becomes active again. This fixes an issue with Chrome which pauses some videos but does not resume them automatically.
• Allow to use the Shapespark desktop application on computers with HTTP proxies that store TLS/SSL certificates in the Windows Certificate Store.
• Do not show back sides of triangles in the render preview to maintain consistency with the viewer.
• New extension trigger icons: pen, sticky note, pen+paper.
• Fix disabling the sky light not being respected. The bug was introduced in 1.17.1.
• Fix lightmap being baked without the post-processing step if a scene had never been saved in the editor.
• Fix missing texture error occurring in some cases when a water material was changed to a standard material.

2020-07-21 - Shapespark 1.17.1

• Support for opacity information in video textures. The alpha channel can be computed automatically using the chroma keying technique, or provided by the user in the lower half of the video file.
• Fix the Shapespark End User License Agreement dialog. On low resolution screens the license text overflowed the "Accept" button making it impossible to click the button.
• Fix water material settings not being preserved on a scene update.
• Fix default responsiveness of img and video elements in HTML labels. Now, they are never upscaled and do to not overflow the screen vertically.
• Fix Revit add-in not to fail when a Revit family is exported.
• Fix sky light not being used in baking/preview until the scene has been saved for the first time.
• Do not allow the scene name to start with a dash. Such names caused scene import to fail.

2020-07-03 - Shapespark 1.17.0

• Support for importing lights defined by Revit's lighting fixtures. The support includes importing an IES profile if a lighting fixture uses one.
• Automatically adjust brightness of spheres shown by the material picker. Material options were often too bright when shown in darker interiors.
• Settings in the Video texture control and Audio extensions to disable looping of videos and sounds.
• Support for importing models in GLB format (binary version of glTF with embedded textures).
• Support for importing FBX files with embedded textures.
• Swap q and e keys for changing the height of the camera to match most other programs key bindings.
• Provide default responsive sizes for img, video and iframe elements in HTML labels to improve the default layout of such elements.
• Improve utilization of CPU cores when compressing textures.
• Fix color picker for the water material.
• Fix iPad being detected as a desktop device when a scene was opened in iOS 13.
• Fix importing of meshes without any faces.
• Fix an issue with some browsers using invalid color space for gray scale textures.
• Increase size of the scroll bar in the top left views menu.

2020-04-27 - Shapespark 1.16.0

• New or improved extensions:
  • Allow to activate extensions by clicking any 3D object in the scene. For example: clicking a TV object can play a video on the TV, clicking a phone object can start a phone/conference call.
  • Rename extension anchors to triggers.
  • A Change view extension to switch views with triggers. The extension combined with the Isolate shadows object setting facilitates buliding scene configurators - it allows switching objects without moving the camera.
  • A Script extension to execute arbitrary JavaScript code when the scene is loaded or a trigger is clicked. It simplifies adding interactions with the viewer API to the scene.
  • A Video texture control extension to start a video with sound and to toggle video playback when a trigger is clicked.
  • Allow Audio track to be played when a trigger is clicked.
  • Add marker icons for popular meeting or messaging apps, including Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger.
• Reduce the size of lightmaps by using smaller margin around lightmap islands. This speeds up scene baking and download by 5-10%.
• Revit add-in improvements:
  • Import advanced material properties from Revit. The imported properties include roughness, bump, metallic scalars and textures.
  • Import decals as textured meshes.
  • Support for the just released Revit 2021.
  • Handle custom geometries with per-face normals.
• Speed up .fbx .dae .obj models import.
• Significantly improve frame rate for scenes using a light probe on iOS devices.
• Show thumbnail and title when a scene is shared in popular messaging/social platforms (eg. Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp).
• Make orbit views use walk navigation in the VR mode, because orbit navigation is not compatible with VR.
• Fix viewer freeze on Android devices (including Oculus Go/Quest) when a scene with video texture is switched to the VR mode.
• Make scene upload or bundle safe to cancel.
• Disable and reload editor when a scene is re-imported or uploaded. Prevents problems with concurrent modifications of a scene.
• Allow to enter VR mode when a scene is opened from the local computer with the HTTP protocol (http://localhost:5000). In 1.15.0 the HTTPS protocol was always required, so the VR mode couldn't be entered without uploading the scene.
• Improve scene bundling to work with older IIS servers not handling .woff2 or .wasm files out of the box.
• Fix scenes not opening in the desktop application if Windows was configured to return text/plain content type for JavaScript files.
• Update the list of keyboard actions in the advanced section of the viewer's help.

2020-03-02 - Shapespark 1.15.0

• Location-dependent camera settings. Allows to set different camera exposure in different regions of a scene. Especially useful for mixed exterior-interior scenes to prevent overexposed exterior or too dark interior.
• Switch to the Basis Universal texture compression format which reduces the scene download size. The three separate compressed formats for different device types (DXT, ETC1, PVRTC) are no longer generated.
• Switch VR mode to use the WebXR browser API instead of the older WebVR API. The switch fixes skewed render scale in VR mode that made room dimensions feel unrealistic on some devices. VR mode now requires HTTP'S connection (WebXR requirement).
• Enable material picker to work in VR mode.
• Automatically adapt VR mode camera height to match the user eye height if the VR device provides such information.
• Request access to orientation and motion sensors when the user enters VR mode on an iOS 13 device. The user no longer has to change Safari settings prior to entering VR mode (such settings change is still required on earlier iOS versions).
• Improve self-hosting bundles format to work out-of-the-box with more HTTP server configurations. See the updated self-hosting documentation.
• A larger selection of icons to be used on clickable anchors in scenes.
• Improve numerical slider in the editor.
• More intelligent model updates to facilitate creation of custom importers.

2019-10-31 - Shapespark 1.14.0

• A Revit add-in for exporting models to Shapespark. The add-in is installed automatically when Shapespark is installed or updated.
• Improved VR-mode support for gamepads and VR controllers:
  • Switch to previous and next views with controllers.
  • Walk with controllers.
  • Change height with controllers.
  • Disable gaze teleport if a controller is detected.
• A water material with animated waves.
• Add acceleration while turning left/right with keyboard and gamepad to make the camera movement smoother.
• Support for saving screenshots in the viewer with the p key (not only in the editor).
• Enable 360 panorama pictures generated in the Shapespark editor (p key) to be recognized as 360 photos by Google Photos.
• Faster exports from SketchUp to Shapespark for models with large number of textures.
• Fix video textures loading problems on iOS devices.
• Fix VR screen freeze on mobile Chrome for scenes with video textures.

2019-09-20 - Shapespark 1.13.0

• Allow to edit position and rotation of lights and light probes with a 3D gizmo.
• Support for video textures provided as MP4 and OGV files.
• Allow to bake a scene with selected objects not casting shadows on the surrounding objects. This enables hiding and replacing objects in the scene using the existing Hide in views option without the hidden objects leaving dark shadow spots.
• Enable 360 panorama pictures generated in the Shapespark editor (P key) to be recognized as 360 photos when posted on Facebook.
• Objects in the editor's Objects tab can now be sorted by name, as an alternative to the default sorting by size.
• Fix incorrect Hide in views behavior in the editor. Previously, hiding objects of a selected type could have lead to hiding parts of objects of another type as well.
• Fix texture file selection issue when the selected file is from the current scene's textures/raw subdirectory.

2019-08-14 - Shapespark 1.12.1

• Allow to capture 360 panorama pictures in the editor. This feature is avaialable through the P key - the one used also for generating regular, flat screenshots.
• Fix model import issues if some of the source textures are read-only.
• Prevent system from entering sleep mode while Shapespark is baking.
• Make touch navigation rotate the model also on touch-enabled desktops.
• Fix minor camera shake when an editor viewport is clicked.

2019-07-23 - Shapespark 1.12.0

• Support for custom domains (available in the Plus plan). A custom domain allows scenes to have addresses from the user's own domain, eg. 3d.your-domain.com/scene-name, while still being uploaded in the ordinary way - using the Upload button - and served from the Shapespark servers.
• Hide anchors viewer extension that adds a menu button to show/hide clickable extension spheres and to configure if the spheres should be visible or hidden by default.
• Make pinch out/in gesture walk forward/backward on mobile devices.
• Make two-finger drag gesture change the camera height on mobile devices.
• Add an eye button to lights, light probes and objects lists of the editor. The buttons move the camera to see the scene element.
• Make double-click in the editor walk to the clicked destination, similar to a single-click in the scene viewer.
• In the editor's object list expand/collapse the object hierarchy only for the clicked instance. Previously, all other instances of the same object type were also expanded/collapsed automatically.
• Fix certain areas of the viewer's viewport not being clickable when the menu is hidden. Even though the menu was hidden the viewport area reserved for it was still intercepting clicks and touch events.
• In the editor allow to copy to clipboard textual values like object or material names.

2019-06-18 - Shapespark 1.11.1

• Fix the lack of the Walk on option in the Objects tab. This issue has been introduced in Shapespark 1.11.0.
• Fix automatic lightmap resolution adjustment using resolution equal to 1 for meshes with Custom lightmap resolution set to 0.

2019-06-12 - Shapespark 1.11.0

• IES profiles support for point and spot lights.
• Improve the automatic updates mechanism not to restart the application automatically. Starting from the next udpate, after the update is downloaded the user will be asked to restart Shapespark manually whenever she/he wants.
• Bring the existing main application window to the front instead of showing a new one when the user tries to start Shapespark while it's already running.
• Fix Shapespark not launching when a new instance is started very shortly after quitting the previous one.
• Chromium browser underlying the desktop application has been upgraded to version 73.

2019-04-26 - Shapespark 1.10.0

• Automatic lightmap resolution adjustment. Now, Shapespark automatically lowers the lightmap resolution to fit the scene in the given number of lightmaps. Previously, if the lightmap resolution was too high Shapespark requested the user to lower the lightmap resolution manually.
• Significantly shorten the UV unwrapping time for spring-like shapes, for example: folded towels, folded bedclothes, springs. Now, the existence of such objects in the scene doesn't lengthen the unwrapping process.
• Make [ and ] keys switch to previous/next view.
• Fix viewport size issues after orientation change on iOS devices.
• Improve scene upload effectiveness on unreliable connections. The retry logic for the failed resource upload has been improved, and the number of retries has been increased.
• Fix failure to import a 3D file when the file path contains Unicode characters.

2019-03-20 - Shapespark 1.9.4

• Fix CUDA devices not being detected for users whose Windows logins contain national characters.
• Allow to automatically show the help pop-up during scene load using #help URL hash.
• Fix WebGL context restoration for instanced geometries. This issue caused rendering artifacts in Windows Mixed Reality.
• Fix looking around with mouse or keyboard arrows in the VR mode. Previously such controls used incorrect center of rotation.
• Make unhiding the mouse pointer (L key) not exit the viewer's full screen mode.
• Fix importing opacity of solid color materials from the glTF file format.
• Fix SketchUp exporter being unable to communicate with the Shapespark desktop application on systems where DNS does not resolve localhost to 127.0.0.1.
• Update the version of NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit used for building Shapespark to 10.1.

2019-02-05 - Shapespark 1.9.3

• Fix scene saving error if the desktop application configuration file is absent. The error was introduced in the just released Shapespark 1.9.2.

2019-02-04 - Shapespark 1.9.2

• Change the desktop full screen mode to show the mouse pointer. L key can be used to hide the pointer.
• Increase the maximum resolution of screenshots taken in the editor (P key) to 8000 x 8000.
• Make it easier to create orbit views. If a new orbit view is added while the camera is already in the orbit mode, the new view uses the current orbit center instead of the default one.
• Save baking device selection for all scenes, not only the current one.

2019-01-21 - Shapespark 1.9.1

• Make the viewer's view list scrollable and prevent it from overlapping with the bottom menu bar.
• Add buttons to hide the user interface of the viewer.
• Decrease the number of draw calls in the viewer mode by merging materials with identical properties.
• Fix a regression introduced in version 1.9.0 causing baking progress bar to be shown only for the first lightmap.

2018-12-31 - Shapespark 1.9.0

• Support for baking on NVIDIA Turing architecture GPUs (eg. RTX 20xx family graphics cards).
• Baking on NVIDIA Fermi architecture GPUs (eg. GTX 4xx and GTX 5xx families graphics cards) is no longer supported.
• Performance improvements decreasing baking time on CPU by about 35% and denoising time by about 50%.
• Allow to select arbitrary subset of CUDA devices for baking. Previously either a single GPU or all GPUs could be selected.
• Fix a regression introduced in 1.8.2 causing scene bundling to fail.

2018-12-20 - Shapespark 1.8.2

• Support for rectangular area lights.
• Provide default configuration for Internet Information Services (Microsoft's web server) inside a self-hosting bundle.
• Fix detection of an Oculus Touch button press.
• Improved blending of transparent objects using cut-out textures (eg. plants) with regular transparent objects.
• Fix a regression introduced in 1.8.1 causing the scene to be rendered without reflections for a short while after the scene is loaded.

2018-11-28 - Shapespark 1.8.1

• New extension anchor type: sprite - rendered as a rectangle with text always facing the camera.
• Allow to select an extension in the editor's Viewer tab by clicking on the extension's anchor (sphere or sprite) in the viewport.
• Background opacity setting for anchors.
• Password reset link available in the application log in window.
• Fix VR mode on iOS.
• Fix sky texture missing from light probes and screenshots.
• Fix straight lines twisting on sky textures. It had been particularly visible for skies with tall buildings.

2018-11-08 - Shapespark 1.8.0

• Share geometry buffers for instanced meshes in the Shapespark viewer. This significantly reduces the viewer memory consumption, especially for scenes with many repeating objects, like office spaces. Previously, the geometry was shared, but only in storage and transfer.
• Make click and VR teleport pass through objects with collisions disabled.
• Activate teleport when #view=view-name URL hash changes. It allows to use the Open website extension (now renamed to Open URL) to switch to one of the views without reloading the scene.
• Added #mobilehi URL hash to force mirror light probes generation on mobile devices. Mirror light probes used for mirror-like reflections are off by default on mobile devices to limit the memory usage.
• Added #flipmouse URL hash allowing to make the mouse rotate the scene instead of the camera in the Walk view mode.

2018-10-23 - Shapespark 1.7.7

• Fix an issue introduced in Shapespark 1.7.6 causing lightmap baking/post-processing errors for users with non-Latin characters in their Windows account name.
• Fix SketchUp extension being unable to localize user's temporary directory on some Windows configurations.

2018-10-12 - Shapespark 1.7.6

• Allow to set the orbit mode angle limits. The new Angle limit setting in the Viewer tab allows to set the vertical orbit range within -90 and 90 degrees.
• Introduce a naming convention that allows to import multiple objects as instances of the same type for file-based 3D model imports. If an object name starts from __NAME__ (NAME preceded and succeeded by double underscores) it is imported as object of type NAME.
• Fix viewer performance problems on Macs with Radeon GPUs.
• Fix stairs climbing with click based teleport and VR gaze teleport. When the teleport destination was at the top or bottom of the stairs, the teleport could stop somewhere on the stairs before reaching the destination, which required additional teleport activations to climb the whole stairs.
• Fix file-based imports of models that contain objects with empty geometries. Such models rendered black after the import.
• Fix camera climbing onto clickable extension spheres for scenes with the camera Auto climb enabled.
• Detect and show to the user CUDA out of memory bake errors. Such errors caused the lightmap to be baked black without any user visible message.
• Allow to specify the initial view with the #view=view-name URL hash.

2018-09-13 - Shapespark 1.7.5

• Support for head-end.html and body-end.html HTML files allowing to customize the viewer UI. If present in the scene directory, these files are inserted as snippets, respectively, at the end of the <head> section and at the end of the <body> section of the scene's index.html file.

2018-09-07 - Shapespark 1.7.4

• Change click-based teleport to take maximum 4.5 seconds. Allows to faster navigate larger scenes.
• Fix click-based teleport not handling clicks in objects further than 100 meters away.
• Automatically generate favicons for scenes.
• Support for custom-cover.jpg, custom-thumbnail.jpg, custom-favicon.ico images in the scene directory. Such images, if present, are used instead of automatically generated cover, thumbnail and favicon images.
• Respect material Double sided setting during collision detection. Back sides of double sided materials now also trigger collisions.
• Fix importing of multi-page TIFF images.
• Read scale and up axis information from FBX. FBX imports no longer require setting these values in the import dialog.
• Initial support for importing additional material properties via a JSON file passed together with the main model file (FBX, OBJ, DAE). The JSON allows to import roughness, metallic, bump and emissive properties. This is intended to help writing custom importers that won't require the use of Shapespark editor to tune materials.

2018-08-21 - Shapespark 1.7.3

• Support for Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets.
• For file-based 3D model imports allow to specify the up axis (Y or Z) if such information is not included in the 3D file format. Previously, Y up axis was always assumed in such cases.
• For file-based 3D model imports allow to import multiple lights as instances of a single light. If an input light name starts from __NAME__ (NAME preceded and succeeded by double underscores) it is imported as an instance of a light named NAME.
• Allow for any gamepad to activate the VR teleport. Previously, buttons of only one gamepad were handled.
• Fix invalid camera yaw rotation after teleporting in VR.
• Choose a more convenient default view if the scene has no views (for example because it has just been imported). The default view is now placed where most of the meshes are, not just in the scene bounding box center.
• Fix sky sphere positioning to always wrap the whole scene.
• Handle WebGL context lost & restore. In some cases, like entering VR mode on Microsoft Mixed Reality headset or switching on/off a GPU, the browser may take the WebGL context away from the Shapespark viewer and give it back after some time. Shapespark viewer now doesn't fail in such cases, but switches to the restored context.

2018-07-30 - Shapespark 1.7.2

• Open Website viewer extension allowing to open a website as a reaction to clicking an extension sphere. In particular, it enables creating an interlinked set of scenes, where one can go from a scene to another by clicking an extension sphere.
• Fix alpha-cutout texture detection not working for scenes without light probes.
• Fix scene load error for scenes with materials using roughnes/metallic/bump texture but no diffuse texture.

2018-07-23 - Shapespark 1.7.1

• Fix lack of image in the render preview. The bug was introduced in 1.7.0.

2018-07-20 - Shapespark 1.7.0

• Improved handling of alpha cutout textures, such as plant textures that use alpha channel to reduce plant geometry size. Such textures no longer exhibit render-order related artifacts.
• Allow to set custom logo URL per each scene from the editor. Such custom logo takes priority over the custom logo set at https://cloud.shapespark.com/#settings.
• Allow to customize color of clickable extension spheres.
• Mark a view menu item immediately when the item is clicked. The view is marked with dark blue and switches to lighter blue when teleport to the view finishes.
• Always show finished jobs in the Bake tab if the list of such jobs is non-empty.
• Apply camera exposure and gamma also to the sky textures.
• Viewer support for HDR sky textures. HDR sky textures are no longer converted to LDR format, but used as HDR by the viewer.
• Make scene import finish successfully for a case when some input textures are corrupted. Such textures are replaced on import with solid red color textures, so they can be easily noticed after the import.
• Self-hosting: Do not precompress HTML and CSS files in a self-hosting bundle. Several users experienced problems to configure web servers to serve precompressed HTML and CSS files without compressing them again. Also some windows FTP clients (FileZilla) incorrectly use ASCII mode to transfer compressed HTML and CSS files which corrupts the files.
• Self-hosting: Use RewriteRule instead of SetEnv in the .htaccess file bundled for self-hosting. SetEnv is not available on some Apache hosting services, RewriteRule is widely available.
• Fix a bug introduced in version 1.6.3 that caused compressed textures to be regenerated during each upload, which increased upload time.
• Fix lightmap bake failures for meshes that consist only of degenerated triangles.

2018-06-13 - Shapespark 1.6.3

• Fix teleport clicks immediately jumping to destination in some cases.
• Fix saving screenshots to a PNG format. There is no longer a 50%-transparent layer which made the screenshot images look pale.
• Increase camera near distance in the orbit mode to prevent Z-fighting artifacts.
• Make collision detection work for meshes that have been unhidden.
• Fix scenes corrupted by cancelling the upload during the web texture generation phase. Re-running the upload repairs such scenes.

2018-04-25 - Shapespark 1.6.2

• Icons for clickable extension spheres. As an alternative to text, spheres can now display icons from the subset of the Font Awesome icon font.
• P key in the editor allows to save a screenshot of the scene. The screenshot renders the current view to a file with a resolution given by the user, so it can have higher resolution than the screen resolution.
• Prettier and stackable editor notification pop-ups.
• Fix horizontal head movements not working in the VR mode in Chrome 65 on Android.
• Make hidden objects not intercept clicks into extension anchor spheres.
• Use versioned resource paths in self-hosting bundles. Uploading a bundle with a new scene version to own hosting no longer requires using a new URL for the scene.

2018-04-10 - Shapespark 1.6.1

• Enable reflections on Edge, IE and Android devices.
• Change the material picker extension to replace all uses of one material with the selected material. Previously it replaced the material only on one selected object type.
• All lists in the editor (material list, view list, object tree etc.) are now automatically scrolled to an entity that is selected in the editor viewport.
• Various editor UI improvements related to the viewer extensions.

2018-03-30 - Shapespark 1.6.0

• Three viewer extensions that increase interactivity of the scenes (configured in the editor Viewer tab):
  • HTML label - allows to place additional information in the scene. Labels support HTML content, including text, images and videos (eg. YouTube or Vimeo videos).
  • Audio - allows to play audio when the scene is viewed.
  • Material picker - allows to change materials.
• Attempt to automatically arrange light probes when a scene is imported for the first time.
• Automatically lock mobile device orientation to landscape in the full-screen mode.
• Fix a bug in the lightmap seam fixer that caused baking to fail for some scenes with very large triangles (eg. terrain triangles).

2018-03-14 - Shapespark 1.5.6

• Color picker for material, sky and light colors.
• Updated importer for OBJ/DAE/FBX:
  • Adds preliminary support for importing from Revit through OBJs produced by inglegreen OBJ Exporter for Revit .
  • Adds support for importing GLTF files.
  • Fixes handling of lights from FBX that were rotated by 90°.
  • Fixes importing of OBJ models that use textures with spaces in file names.
• Fixed baking engine crashes for scenes that include objects with base color textures but with missing diffuse UVs.
• An editor configuration option to limit the number of simultanously uploaded files. The option is intended for users that are behind proxies that do not allow for several concurrent uploads.

2018-02-21 - Shapespark 1.5.5

• Do not allow a scene to be edited while a lightmap for the scene is baked.
• Improved support for transparency in reflections. Transparent materials were not visible in the reflected image. After the change transparent pixels with low alpha (for example window glass) are not visible, but pixels with high alpha (for example leaves) are visible.
• Highlight the destination view name after the user is teleported to the view.
• Ensure minimum dimensions for GPU-compressed textures are respected. DXT and ETC1 textures are now at least 4x4, PVRTC at least 8x8.
• An informative message if the user attempts to import SketchUp model via '.skp' file instead of the extension for SketchUp.
• Improved lightmap encoding to fix problems with high light intensity pixels in IE and Edge. Overexposed pixels were rendered as black in these two browsers.

2018-01-29 - Shapespark 1.5.4

• Fix lightmap baking errors. For some scenes the baking process was failing at the very end of baking, which resulted in a message 'Bake failed: process exited with non-zero status.'.
• Fix reversed mouse navigation in Internet Explorer. IE was incorrectly detected as a mobile browser, so mouse navigation moved the model (as on touch-screen devices) instead of the camera.
• Fix reflective materials not being rendered in Firefox on Android.
• Allow to enter any values as light probe bounding boxes dimensions in the editor. The dimensions are now validated when the number input loses focus, not when the digits are typed.

2018-01-19 - Shapespark 1.5.3

• Sky texture can be now used in all types of views: walk, top and orbit. Sky texture visibility is controled with the Show sky texture setting in the Viewer tab. By default the sky texture is turned on only for walk-type views.

2018-01-08 - Shapespark 1.5.2

• Fixed an issue in removing unused diffuse UV coordinates performed on scene upload. The removal phase had a bug that made UV mapping incorrect for objects using coordinates from a large range.

2018-01-04 - Shapespark 1.5.1

• We are launching Shapespark Community forum at https://forum.shapespark.com, please join!
• Drop the 'experimental' annotation for CUDA GPU baking. CUDA baking proofed to work well.
• The uploaded scene list at https://cloud.shapespark.com now includes Twitter and Facebook share buttons. The buttons can be hidden at https://cloud.shapespark.com/#settings.
• Change the auto-update mechanism to check for updates not only during the application launch, but every 4h.
• Shapespark plugin for SketchUp suggests a valid scene names if a name entered by the user contains reserved characters.
• Fixed bake failures for scenes with large objects that do not fit into a lightmap. A procedure that searched for a suitable lightmap resolution for such objects resulted in an error.
• Fixed diffuse UV mapping for objects with very high UV values. Some UV mapping tools produce large, not normalized UV values that require good precision (for example values between 140000 and 140000.1). UV quantization rounded such large values which resulted in incorrect texture mappings.
• Fixed handling of textures with commas in ICC profile names.

2017-12-05 - Shapespark 1.5.0

• Fireflies filter. New post-processing filter that automatically removes square artifacts caused by fireflies in baked scenes. The artifacts appeared in scenes with strong light sources that directly illuminated very near objects. It is no longer necessary to move strong lights away from objects to prevent such artifacts.
• Fix saving of scenes with sky textures. The bug was introduces in the Shapespark version 1.4.3 and caused load failures after a scene with a sky texture was saved from the editor.

2017-12-01 - Shapespark 1.4.3

• Change the Override checkboxes in the Materials tab to a lock and an unlock icons (the icons are used to control if the base color and opacity properties are imported from a 3D modeling program or set in the Shapespark editor).
• Handle incorrect SketchUp plugins directory structure while installing the SketchUp extension.

2017-11-26 - Shapespark 1.4.2

• Fix for SketchUp extension installation error on machines without SketchUp installed.

2017-11-24 - Shapespark 1.4.1

• Support for SketchUp 2018.
• Foot distance unit option for FBX and OBJ import.
• Better handling of textures with insignificant transparency. Textures which contain a small amount of pixels with only a slight transparency are now treated as if they were fully opaque which improves their rendering quality.
• Fixed walking by clicking the mouse button in the full screen mode. The destination of the walk is now determined from the point at the center of the camera.
• Fixed occasional Shapespark editor launch failures happening immediately after updating Shapespark to a new version. Such failures were caused by the automatic scene format conversion process taking too long and blocking the editor from launching. The conversion process has been improved and now the editor never has to wait for the scene format conversion to finish.

2017-10-30 - Shapespark 1.4.0

• Texture atlases. Non-repeating textures are automatically packed together into atlases to limit the download size and the number of textures that are used at run-time.
• Faster scene imports. Compressed textures (DXT, PVR, ETC1) are no longer generated during the scene import, but during the upload.

2017-10-05 - Shapespark 1.3.6

• Switched PVRTC texture compression for iOS devices to use the compressor from Imagination Technologies (PVRTexLib).
• Fixed post-processing failures for scenes containing tiny triangles baked with low lightmap resolution.

2017-09-20 - Shapespark 1.3.5

• Automatic tours. A new presentation mode in which the user is automatically navigated between all the views in the scene. The tour can be enabled for the scene from the editor Viewer tab, then a button for starting the tour is added to the bottom menu. The tour can be also configured to start after the scene is loaded without any user interaction.
• Acceleration and deceleration when switching to a view to make the camera move smoother.
• Increase the camera speed when switching to a distant view. For large exterior scenes the switch used to take too long.

2017-09-06 - Shapespark 1.3.4

• Increased maximum walking speed configurable in the Camera tab.
• Fixed post-processing failures for low-resolution UV layouts containing degenerated triangles.

2017-08-30 - Shapespark 1.3.3

• Multi-core lightmap denoising. All the CPU cores are used for the lightmap denoising, which makes this process a few times faster (2x faster on a dual-core CPU, 4x on a quad-core one etc.)
• Performance improvements (about 14% speedup) for CPU baking.
• Fix lightmap artifacts affecting some of the scenes with multiple lightmaps created with Shapespark 1.3.
• Fix post-processing failures for some complex scenes having more than 3M triangles.

2017-08-07 - Shapespark 1.3.2

• Support for baking on multiple CUDA devices at once. The Device option of the Bake tab allows to choose a MULTI device consisting of all the CUDA devices in the system.
• An option to turn progressive loader on/off. The option is placed in the Viewer tab.
• Ensure unique material names on FBX import. Some FBX files contain materials with duplicate names. Now during import the duplicate material names are given suffixes to ensure their uniqueness. Fixes baking failures for scenes imported from FBX files with duplicate material names (requires reimporting such scenes).

2017-07-27 - Shapespark 1.3.1

• Base color texture setting. Base color texture can be set in the editor, so changing a material's base color texture no longer needs to be done in the 3D modelling tool.
• Base color texture correction. Color correction can be applied to a base color texture in the editor, without the need to edit the texture in an external program. Two color correction operations are possible: contrast and HSL color shift.
• CUDA device selection. In systems with multiple CUDA devices the Device option of the Bake tab lists all the CUDA devices and allows to select one to use. Previously, only one CUDA device was listed.
• Total baking time information. The time the baking job took is displayed as a tooltip while hovering the mouse on the finised job in the Jobs list of the Bake tab.
• Mouse-triggered teleport in the VR mode. Clicking a mouse button triggers teleport in the VR mode.
• Support for TIFF and TGA (Targa) textures.
• Canonical formats for textures. All the source textures are converted to JPG and PNG (if transparency is needed) formats, and these formats are used if a device does not support compressed formats. Fixes baking failures happening for certain source BMP textures.

2017-07-13 - Shapespark 1.3.0

• Progressive loader. Allows to start interacting with the scene before all resources are loaded to improve the experience for users with slow internet connection.
• Automatic detection of objects with identical geometry. The detection works no matter if the objects are instances in the 3D modeling program. Reduces download size, especially for scenes with many repeating objects, like office spaces.
• Better lightmap packing. Empty spaces in the lightmap UV islands are now filled with other UV islands, which reduces lightmaps count and sizes.
• Improved lightmap encoding. Fixes banding artifacts that were visible in some dark areas.
• Improved automatic scene migrations. If a Shapespark application update introduces scene format changes that require migration of scenes on the user computer, the migration progress is now shown in the main Shapespark window. The user can start working with a scene immediately after the scene is migrated, even if other scenes are still being migrated. Shapespark can be safely closed while the migrations are running.
• New Double sided setting in the editor Materials tab. If enabled, both sides of the objects covered with the material are rendered and visible. The setting is useful for small objects, such as leaves, that are modeled as flat 2D surfaces but should be visible from both sides.
• Fix uploading of scenes for which the sky texture was added in an HDR format.
• Do not show the VR button on iOS devices if a scene is opened in an iframe. iOS doesn't allow accelerometer events, that are required for VR to work, to be delivered to an iframe.
• Use the KTX container for all compressed texture formats, drop the use of the DDS container.

2017-05-23 - Shapespark 1.2.4

• Menu and help are now hidden in the VR mode on iOS, so they do not interfere with the stereoscopic image.
• Switch to one common lightmap format for all the browsers. There is no longer a format specific to iOS browsers and Internet Explorer. Reduces the size of the scene on disk and the upload time.

2017-05-05 - Shapespark 1.2.3

• Fixed PVRTC texture generation causing mipmapped textures to be rendered black on some iOS devices.

2017-04-28 - Shapespark 1.2.2

• Generate compressed version of textures for iOS (PVRTC) and Android (ETC1) devices. Such textures reduce the amount of memory used by the scene and allow larger scenes to run on mobile devices.
• Added Troubleshooting section to the help.

2017-04-04 - Shapespark 1.2.1

• Fixed baking failures for empty meshes.

2017-03-30 - Shapespark 1.2.0

• Refreshed the viewer UI.
• Two help modes in the viewer: basic with the most important controls, and advanced with all the supported controls.
• Basic support for VR controllers and gamepads. A controller button can be used to immediately activate the VR teleport.
• Fixed installation and scene export problems for users that have non-ASCII characters in Windows usernames.
• Changed geometry index buffer to take into account lightmap UVs. The index buffer is now used also for rendering which reduces geometry size in the GPU memory by about 50%.
• Improved sorting of transparent objects, reduces the number of cases when transparent materials are incorrectly mixed together because objects are rendered in a wrong order.
• Added an OpenGraph meta tag to the viewer to show the scene opening cover when the scene is shared on sites that support OpenGraph (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn).
• A clearer error message when the scene upload fails due to internet connection problems.

2017-03-02 - Shapespark 1.1.2

• Improved the Shapespark Help, in particular added a Frequently Asked Questions section.
• Detect potentially too large scene scale and issue a warning.
• Inform about lightmap baking for a scene without a lightmap opened in the editor.

2017-02-16 - Shapespark 1.1.1

• Documented Cinema 4D import via the COLLADA format.
• Use simple headlight lighting for unbaked scenes also in the view mode (it was already used for unbaked scenes in the edit mode).
• Further scene geometry storage reduction leading to shorter download times and smaller GPU memory consumption.
• Fixed materials with mirror-like reflections being rendered black on some mobile devices.

2017-02-01 - Shapespark 1.1.0

• Newer and prettier bundled example-room scene.
• Scene geometry storage reduced by 10-15% leading to shorter download times and smaller GPU memory consumption.
• Improved support for baking on CUDA devices.
• Various optimizations improving frame-rate for complex scenes on slower devices.
• Fixed reflections for scenes starting in the Top or Orbit view with ceiling or some other large objects hidden.

2017-01-23 - Shapespark 1.0.38

• Added gaze-based teleport in the VR mode. Looking at a fixed point for a few seconds teleports the viewer to this point.
• Orbit and top views no longer show the sky texture.
• Improved merging vertices for the purpose of lightmap UVs generation. It fixes lighting artifacts for models in which there are duplicated vertices, but the normals of the duplicates differ very slightly.

2017-01-12 - Shapespark 1.0.37

• Disabled auto-smoothing for objects imported without vertex normals.
• Fixed editor selection precision issues ocurring on some computers. Previously, on such computers clicking on a small object or material might have selected incorrect object/material.
• Fixed light probe bounding box being rendered black in the editor on some computers.

2017-01-05 - Shapespark 1.0.36

• Improved automatic light probe bounding box size detection to reduce the number of cases when the box size needs to be manually adjusted.
• Made FBX the main import format for 3ds Max and documented the new import process.
• Restricted editor number input fields to ensure the value is from the correct range. For example: a value higher than 1.0 entered for material Opacity is automatically clamped to 1.0.
• Fixed a bug with not detecting mouse button release outside of of the viewer that affected Google Chrome users. When the mouse was released outside of the viewer and then the pointer re-entered the viewer, the mouse was incorrectly treated as pressed.
• Removed the box collider setting from the editor's Objects tab.
• Marked CUDA support as experimental.

2016-12-29 - Shapespark 1.0.35

• Faster scene upload.
• Faster web textures generation during the scene import and update.
• Place the camera in the scene center when an opened scene has no views.
• Make the scene center the intial orbit point for orbit-type views.
• Fixed a light probe initialization bug that caused rendering artifacts when a light probe was added from the editor.
• Do not import cameras for .fbx, .dae and .obj sources.

2016-12-21 - Shapespark 1.0.34

• Improved support for FBX imports.
• Documented Maya import via FBX.
• Improved collision detection performance for large objects.

  Setting  box collider  or disabling collisions for large objects is no longer needed.

2016-12-07 - Shapespark 1.0.33

• A form for reporting problems and asking support questions from the main Shapespark window.
• Do not show switch to full screen menu item if the viewer is launched from an iframe without the 'allowfullscreen' attribute.
• Fixed the viewer resizing problems on Safari mobile when a device is rotated.

2016-12-02 - Shapespark 1.0.32

• During scene import always convert textures with embedded ICC profile to sRGB color space. Improves color accuracy for browsers without proper ICC profiles support.
• Added 'Uploaded scenes' link to the main Shapespark window.

2016-11-22 - Shapespark 1.0.31

Shapespark leaves closed beta.