Development Log | Unigine (3D engine for games and real-time virtual worlds)

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2006-12-03

COLLADA, usability and more light.

Today is 3rd December, "3D day". Our congratulations to everyone who is engaged in 3D industry - artists and graphics programmers. We hope that working in exciting 3D virtual worlds is as fun for you, as it is for us.

Well, let's get back to the news. Unigine now supports COLLADA 1.4, therefore one could easily use 3ds Max, Maya, Blender, SOFTIMAGE|XSI, LightWave and any 3D editor, which can export into COLLADA format (DAE), within Unigine art pipeline.

List of changes:

Rotation of PRT light using new transformation system.
Better directory functions.
Improved ImageDialog with support of per-channel view.
RichText renamed to FontRich.
Redesigned FileDialog.
Visualization of overloaded parameters for material hierarchy, support of resetting to parent values.
Fixed mipmaps generator.
Fixed blending for transparent materials.
AmbientMapper now works with high-poly models.
Support of rectangular textures in NormalCombiner.
Support of COLLADA 1.4.
Preliminary refactoring for terrain shaders.
Optimizations for immovable dynamic lights.
Mesh interaction tracing speedup.

Some of the recent changes could be easily noticed by customers because we have changed the look of dialog windows and re-designed some parts of default GUI skin. Our main concern was easy file manipulations for artists so we've changed layout and functionality of FileDialog: now it has tabs and preview:
File dialog
There are more UI improvements to come, they will be available in 3-4 weeks.

Now we have clear way towards physics refactoring and integration.