Jahshaka VR 0.2.0 release up

[jahshaka]

It's been a little over three months since our first alpha release. Since then we've made significant changed to JahshakaVR. It almost feels brand new. We improved the user interface, added a new rendering engine (IrisGL) and, finally, added VR rendering (Only Oculus HMDs supported at the moment). JahshakaVR now builds on both Windows and Linux, and a fix for OsX will be out shortly so it will be truly cross platform.

Download the windows binary
https://github.com/jahshaka/VR/releases/tag/v0.2.0-alpha

Build from Source (linux/OsX)
https://github.com/jahshaka/VR/

Here are the list of features we've added and/or changed since the last release:

Scene:
• Objects can now form a deep heirarchy - objects can be children of other objects
• Translation, scaling and rotation gizmos are all available now
• Gizmos render on top of selected scene nodes
• Gizmos scale to adjust size automatically
• You can switch between local and global transformation modes for the gizmos
• Entire scenes can be loaded from model files (meshes only)
• Scenes save and load properly
• New default scene
• Picking is now much faster and accurate
• Lights can be picked from viewport
• Light icons are always rendered on top
• Selected objects are outlined
• Objects added to the scene are added in front of the camera, not at the center of the scene
• New objects added to the scene are automatically selected
• Camera has two modes: ArcBall and Free
• Free camera micmics unity's
• ArcBall camera micmics blender's
• Ambient color can be set at both the scene level and on a per-object level

IrisGL (Renderer):
• Switched rendering engine from Qt3D to custom-built IrisGL
• Built on top of Qt's OpenGL library
• Built as a separate project for easy integration into other projects
• Supports rendering in VR (Oculus only at the moment)
• Scene objects can be parented to other scene objects forming a heirarchy
• Has a flexible material system
• Uses Assimp for loading models which supports 40+ model file types
• Keyframe animations are stored in Animation class rather than in the SceneNode class itself, this allows for SceneNodes to have multiple animations
• Animation keyframes store animation for arbitrary properties not just transformation
• Spotlight cutoff can now be softened
• Lights now have specified a distance - with the exception of directional lights
• Comes with an all-in-one default material built in
• Core classes (Mesh, Shader, VertexLayout) can be used without using the Scene and ForwardRenderer classes - you can make render calls directly

UI:
• Completely changed the look and feel of the ui
• Uses dock panels for a flexible layouts
• Properties for selected objects are shows in a vertical window, with collapsible panels
• Removed startup dialog box
• Removed slider from animation panel; You navigate by dragging the middle mouse button to pan and scrolling the mouse wheel to zoom
• Button on scene viewport indicated whether an oculus is available or not and allows you to switch to vr mode

VR:
• You can view the scenes in virtual reality
• Currently only supports Oculus HMDs
• Button on the scene view widget indicated whether or not an oculus device is detected

Miscellaneous:
• Replaced material presets to better ones
• Switched file format from xml to json
• Changed method of copying assets to output folder - no need to configure anything in QtCreator
• Material presets are now defined in files as opposed to being hard-coded - new presets can be added independent of releases now

Even though the project is still in its infancy, we think it's good enough for people to start messing with and making cool things. We hope you have a lot of fun using it, we've certainly had a lot of fun making it.

Looking forward to your feedback on this release!

[iKlsR]

Hi all, I'm one of the developers working on this project. We still have a ways to go but there is a roadmap and we are working hard to reach a more stable beta with more world creation tools, an asset library and improved rendering and interaction in the viewport and VR mode. Any feedback, issue reports and suggestions are more than welcome!

As an addendum, we are adding more and more features everyday, it's currently best to build from the repository to get the latest additions such as realtime soft shadows (shown above), more material presets and improved lighting and viewport rendering which were added after our feature freeze for the release. Building from source is as simple as cloning the repository, opening it in Qt Creator and clicking run.

Looking forward to interacting with the community.

[njbrown]

I'm really excited that we got this release out. I'm really eager to see your feedback guys.