Lots of optimizations, support for explicit tangents information in glTF and X3D, X3D 4.0 being finalized

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As I mentioned in the news post 2 weeks ago, lately I’ve been following a trail of reworking and optimizing some renderer code. In particular this is important if you do skinned animation in glTF with bump mapping — which is a very common use-case. New features / optimizations:

  • We support now explicit tangent vectors information, by new X3D node Tangent .

  • We read from glTF tangents information. So if you export e.g. from Blender a glTF model that has normalmaps, it is beneficial to click the checkbox “Tangents” at export options — this way CGE will not have to calculate this information, so loading will be faster.

  • We animate tangents correctly when skinned animation is used.

  • We generate tangents once, at load, for the most common case of glTF with IndexedTriangleSet geometry, this makes rendering fast — even if you didn’t export with “Tangents”.

  • When tangents are used, they are loaded to the VBO together with coordinates and normals (since they usually all change simultaneously during skinned animation).

  • Coordinates, normals and tangents are updated using fast track to VBO: fixed for tangents, faster in case of no tangents.

  • Memory usage and loading time of precalculating glTF animation optimized. Our approach is still memory-hungry, unfortunately, esp. if you have long-running animations. You will see in the log messages like "Memory occupied by precalculating "xxx" animation: yyy" if an animation eats more than 10 MB. The true solution for this (already planned, but post CGE 7.0 release) is to move the entire skinned animation calculation to GPU.

In an unrelated news, X3D 4.0 specification is getting finalized, with last public draft here. This includes the modification from Michalis to add PBR and many other material upgrades to X3D, making it also consistent with glTF.

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