Newsletter – Issue 008

📆 2023-02-08

🔥 Headlines

My main personal takeaway from the meetup is that Three.js' mrdoob (opens in a new tab) thinks the way forward for writing shaders is node-based solutions that provide a compatibility abstraction layer over WebGL Shader Language (GLSL) and WebGPU Shader Language (WGSL). In Three.js, that would be the NodeMaterial (opens in a new tab), which has a visual editor (opens in a new tab). Three.js is working on aligning with the MaterialX (opens in a new tab) open standard for node-based materials and already has a MaterialXLoader (opens in a new tab). Sunag (opens in a new tab) does the heavy lifting on that front. You can also check out Hendrik Mans (opens in a new tab)' Shader Composer (opens in a new tab), which has React Three Fiber bindings but currently only supports GLSL.

Three.js (opens in a new tab) only supports instanced skinned meshes for WebGPU (opens in a new tab), not WebGL, so Cody Bennett (opens in a new tab) wrote a user-land port of the unmerged PR (opens in a new tab) for InstancedSkinnedMesh in a CodeSandbox (opens in a new tab).
Editor and code generator (opens in a new tab) for MeshTransmissionMaterial by Alex Warnes (opens in a new tab). Works for R3F and Threlte.
@threlte/gltf (opens in a new tab) is an experimental fork of gltfjsx (opens in a new tab) for Threlte by Grischa Erbe (opens in a new tab) to transform gLTF and GLB files into declarative Threlte components (demo (opens in a new tab)).
Phy (opens in a new tab), 3TH (opens in a new tab)'s game engine to add physics to Three.js, now supports NVIDIA PhysX (opens in a new tab) 5.1 via physx-js-webidl (opens in a new tab) JavaScript / Wasm bindings. See the other new features (opens in a new tab) and live demo (opens in a new tab). 3TH also created Oimo.js (opens in a new tab) and Full IK (opens in a new tab).
PlayCanvas v1.61.0 (opens in a new tab) – PlayCanvas now supports Microsoft's Volumetric Videos (opens in a new tab). All PlayCanvas builds now include WebGPU support (it was previously only included in debug builds), adding only 9kb (opens in a new tab) to the engine!
Babylon.js v5.45.0 (opens in a new tab)

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