The Babylon.js team has announced their 3.2 release which leverages additional WebGL 2.0 features to improve its 3D rendering, further embraces modern JavaScript and TypeScript patterns, and adds more animation options and special effects.
Babylon.js is a JavaScript framework authored in TypeScript for building 3D games and experiences with HTML5, WebGL, WebVR and Web Audio. It provides tools to export from popular 3D tools such as Blender, Unity, 3DS Max, Maya, and Clara.io into Babylon.js objects. The Babylon team strives to support 3D experiences in a wide variety of browsers and devices. This release introduces many new cache layers within the Babylon JavaScript engine in order to reduce JavaScript execution time, conserving browser resources for 3D GPU calculations.
Additionally, the release adds several new WebGL 2.0 features including improved shadows with Percentage Closer Filtering and contact hardening, as well as anti-aliasing algorithm updates with specular anti-aliasing, reducing visual artifacts on shiny objects. Browsers without support for WebGL 2.0 have fallback options provided by the project.
The Babylon 3.2 release adds animation blending and animation weights to improve animation options further. Animation blending allows developers to transition from one animation to another seamlessly. Animation weights let developers mix multiple animations by specifying the weight for each. The project provides a variety of special effects, and this release adds a glow layer, making part of an object appear to glow.
GPU particles, another WebGL 2.0 feature, are now available, allowing particles to be animated and rendered by the GPU rather than animations occurring with the CPU, further improving performance speed with effects.
The project now supports ES2015 promises, along with async/await, improving Babylon’s approach to asynchronous code.
A complete list of Babylon 3.2 updates and bug fixes contains all of the changes for this release, and there are many interactive demos available highlighting the features of this release at the Babylon.js playground. Babylon.js is available under the Apache 2.0 open source license. Contributions are welcome via the Babylon.js GitHub project.