Hello all, and welcome to the 3DVIA Studio Version 2.13.191 Patch Notes!  There is a lot of information to cover so let’s dive right in! You can discuss the changes in our forums and download 3DVIA Studio beta here.

Major Improvements

Point Cloud Support from 3D Scans (Pro Only)
New Points Clouds support, to visualize complex industrial data coming from 3D digitization.

• Support of ASC file format to import Point Clouds data.
• Support for custom attributes on points:
• Color
• Normal
• Size
• Picking and selection sets, using Octree representation.
• Levels of details automatically generated on import.

Screen Space Partitioning Occlusion System (Pro Only)
Improvement of Screen Space Partitioning occlusion system (Pro Only), to better support very large database visualization and very large meshes.
SSP Occlusion system, introduced in V6R2012x, is more optimized and can now be used with:

• Moving objects
• Water
• Terrains
• Characters
• Particle systems

New Physics Engine
Physics Engine integration has been fully re-engineered to improve user’s work flow.

Immersive Virtuality

• Cluster support (Pro Only): Complementing existing multi-pipe support, Studio now fully supports distributed rendering over a cluster of PCs for complete scalability.
• New Stereo rendering modes: From desktop to 3DTVs and pro-high end systems, Studio now supports all stereo rendering modes including active stereo.
• New interaction devices for new user experiences: “Body Full Motion Capture with FAAST and 3DTV” SUI allows to very easily manage full body motion capture using Kinect sensor through VRPN server, along with 3DTV display.
• SUI Library has been enhanced to include new scenarios for 3DTV and Microsoft Kinect, further expanding the range of tools available for creating immersive user experiences.

Additional Enhancements

SSAO Effect

• High quality dynamic Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) is now a one-click effect from viewport property view.
• Dramatically increase the visual quality of your projects without any preparation efforts!

Path planning enhancements

• Path Planning now works with 3DVIA Studio’s Terrains.
• New Seed Groups give more control on the generated Navigation Mesh by allowing objects filtering.
• Users can now fuse / un-fuse pre-calculated navigation meshes, opening the door to custom streaming strategies.

Sound Engine improvements

• Visual representation of sound emission cone, for better usability.
• Sound inner and outer cones associated to outer volume value, for more control on sound attenuation.
• Possibility to set position and orientation of 3D sound relatively to the 3D node holding it.
• Additional information about sound asset is now available (Sampling Rate, Format, Size, Duration, Number of channels).
• Possibility to provide new sound engine implementation or sound asset support through Studio SDK.

Human animation enhancements, to improve usability

• Status of animation queue is now available.
• Transition start/stop/status.
• End of animation, when clamped.
• State of next animation in the queue, when synchronized.

Documentation

• Unified documentation now includes 3DVIA Studio’s User Manual available on 3dvia.COM.
• Simple documented projects are now available from Studio Load Page, to illustrate key concepts and shorten Studio learning curve (more will be added in the future).

New Studio Nature Library

• Life-Like Lake and Ocean water effects are now available as drag & drop ready-to-use components from 3DVIA Studio’s Nature Library.
• Support for reflections and refractions.
• Wave FFT Simulation, running on GPU for maximum efficiency.
• Shadows
• Foam
• Depth attenuation

GUI Evolutions

Better Usability & Productivity

• Right click menu additions to ease object creation (2D, 3D, Cameras and Lights).
• Contextual menu on 3D objects (behavior creation directly in 3D View).
• Ability to Drag&Drop “.mpexp” in Studio (mpexp are complete experience in source code on 3DVIA.com).

Technical Enablers easing development of modular applications based on dynamic component loading

• New Attribute Holders, to easily store attributes of variant types on actors in a way that is compliant with dynamic object loading.
• New Simple Message type, to easily send event with custom data in a way that is compliant with dynamic object loading.
• New vkVariant type exposed in VSL, allowing weak typing for more advanced scripting.

New Toolbar and Views added

• Dynamics Toolbar
• Collisions Rules View
• Insert Links View

New Context Menu functions

• “Add existing Behavior” command with search box for those with large projects.
• “Move to” stage/group command with the ability to create new stage/group as destination.

Work on the go!

• Support for laptop (no mouse) with new navigation tools (orbit, pan and zoom).
• Offline User Manual Documentation available with No Internet connection needed.

New Product Branding

• Attractive, Sophisticated & Sexy!

Under the Hood

Asset Pipeline

• Support for compressed Collada files (ZAE): 3dvia.COM explorer now allows to download original files (DAE or ZAE) when available, in addition to 3DXML files, allowing one to take advantage of Collada format-specific features.
• Improvement of 3DXML roundtrip support inside Studio, while synchronizing a 3DXML file modified outside 3DVIA Studio.

Player Improvements

3DVIA Studio Pro Player Deployment (Pro Only)

• It is now possible to develop and create 64 bit applications embedding the 3DVIA Player Pro, which now comes in native 64 bits flavor.
• Watermarked Player mode now allows to deploy watermarked content without runtime license check, for test only.
• Dynamic content setting: it is now possible to instantiate Player Pro without referencing initial content, then set content dynamically afterward.
• Eased development: to prevent confusion, the Player Pro does not start in IDE.

3DVIA Web Player Deployment

• Install and update process enhancements: zero click updates, dramatically improved update times and no need to restart the browser whenever possible.
• Full upward and backward compatibility management of Experiences: 3DVIA Player can now determine and load the best player version for a given content.
• Support for the latest versions of the browsers (Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 7 and Chrome 14).
• Better HTTPS integration in web pages.
• Fixed various issues in fullscreen with Chrome in some configurations.
• Publish, watermark and licensed experience support.
• New Branding

On Wednesday Nov 16, 3DVIA Studio Beta & 3DVIA Studio Player where updated to version 2.13.194 with bug fixes reported on our Forums.

• Fixed issue that could cause URL detection to fail when the experience is embedded in multiple nested iframes or Facebook using Internet Explorer
• Fixed issue that could cause JavaScript events from the Player to the page to fail when the experience is embedded in Facebook using Firefox
• Fixed issue that could cause installation failure of the Player engines on some OS configurations when the user’s windows’ account name contains Unicode character
• Fixed issue that could cause random crash at exit on some configurations with certain experiences
• Fixed issue that could problems in 3D sounds positioning
• Fixed issue impacting SSAA