There are many approaches to creating realistic-looking materials for 3D objects. However, not all of them are suitable for transmission over the Web, and many have a prohibitively steep learning curve. Physically Based Rendering (PBR) has emerged as an artist-friendly, intuitive, expressive, and robust technique for adding materials to 3D objects. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group has embraced this approach, and over the past few years, they have created formal glTF extensions for a variety of PBR materials. glTF’s growing set of PBR material extensions allow artists to create strikingly realistic 3D objects – suitable for cross-platform applications including browsers, mobile devices, native applications and more – that will perform consistently across a wide range of viewers and devices.
Note: this blog summarizes the September 27, 2022 Webinar “Delivering Interactive Experiences with glTF. Access the full webinar recording here.
The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is constantly assessing emerging requirements of the glTF ecosystem and asking how the group can make the most impactful progress. Over the past 18 months, one issue has consistently bubbled to the top of these discussions: interactivity.
The urgency of developi
Interoperability specifications, such as Khronos open standards, can significantly widen their market recognition and adoption by becoming International Standards. International Standards are recognized throughout the world, and in many countries form the regulatory basis for public procurement of IT goods and services. An International Standard also provides important assurances of stability and longevity.
Working with ISO/IEC JTC 1
ISO/IEC JT
The field of 3D Computer graphics has grown from a niche technical curiosity in the mid-1970s to mass appeal and distribution via movies and games. We’ve seen applications grow from flying logos, to highly engaging real-time renderings in games, to synthetic humans and de-aged actors in movies finally crossing the “uncanny valley” to be nearly indistinguishable from reality. However, the creation of 3D assets - computer graphics objects and the worlds they inhabit - still requires highly skilled technicians and artists, presenting a bottleneck to more widespread applications, such as creating 3D graphics for websites and E-Commerce.
The Virtual Learning Factory Toolkit (VLFT) project is a pioneering program commissioned by the European Union using virtual and augmented reality to enhance engineering education programs across Europe. Five EU partners make up the VLFT Consortium, including Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology, Hungary’s Institute for Computer Science and Control, Italy’s Politecnico di Milano, National Research Council of Italy, and Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology. Using Khronos® standards, the VLFT consortium has created a suite of tools to gamify learning, strengthen information and communication technology (ICT) skills, and better prepare students for jobs in 21st century manufacturing.
The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group recently announced the ratification of three new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) extensions for the glTF 3D asset format: KHR_materials_volume, KHR_materials_ior, and KHR_materials_specular. The three new extensions build on and extend the existing glTF 2.0 PBR capabilities by adding volume-based absorption, refraction, and complex specular reflections. Some or all of these new extensions are already supported by rendering engines such as Babylon.js, Google’s Filament, and three.js, as well as applications including Adobe’s Substance 3D Stager, Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, DGG RapidCompact and UX3D’s Gestaltor. These extensions will grant artists control of photorealistic effects in glTF, enhancing the appearance of 3D assets. This blog will explore how these extensions are implemented and which variables will be available for artists to control.
As the number of 3D assets used in e-commerce rapidly increases, the need to embed semantic information describing virtual products within real-time 3D formats such as glTF™ becomes ever more urgent. 3D asset files that contain descriptive and administrative metadata such as product descriptions, details on intellectual property rights, creation and modification dates and other detailed authoring history - all in multiple languages - will e
Recently, the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group hosted a webinar to discuss its activities, including why industry alignment on the glTF file format (the “JPEG for 3D”) is crucial, and how standardization will bring new opportunities to any designer, retailer, manufacturer or technology company developing 3D experiences. At the end of the webinar, the audience submitted questions for panelists. As this dialogue benefits the whole community, we’re sharing the answers as a Q&A. You can watch the complete webinar recording, but this is not a verbatim transcription: The questions have been reordered for a logical flow, and additional data released since the webinar has been added. If you have questions of your own, comment below and we’ll be sure to get back to you!
In the world of e-commerce, many products come in different options, or variants. When shopping online, for example, colors and materials of a brand of shoe might have an image representing each option. And now, in addition to using 2D images, more and more retailers are starting to use 3D and AR to merchandise products in online channels to enable customers to more fully experience products or view items in their environment in rich 3D. Each time a customer views a different colored shoe, there’s a good chance that another complete 3D model is being loaded just to display that color variant. This leads to increased download times and wasted bandwidth as the files contain a lot of redundant data, including downloading exactly the same geometry multiple times. In turn this causes increased memory usage on the device, and slower interactivity, resulting in a poor customer experience. Learn how the Khronos Group and the 3D Commerce working group is improving this.
The Khronos 3D Commerce™ Working Group was established with the goal of spearheading industry alignment on the creation, management and display of 3D content for e-commerce—and since its formation, the use cases for 3D assets in e-commerce have rapidly expanded. In response, the 3D Commerce Working Group has today released V1.0 of its Realtime Asset Creation Guidelines for use by 3D artists who are familiar with 3D workflows, but new to creating e-commerce 3D assets for cross-platform delivery.
In this guest blog, Norbert Nopper, Managing Director at UX3D, discusses editing glTF models and introduces a new visual glTF editor, Gestaltor. Norbert discusses how to directly edit glTF models and when that may lead to higher productivity when creating 3D models. Starting with a brief introduction to glTF and common workflows and discussing the possibilities and challenges involved in directly editing glTF asset files. Wrapping up with examples of how direct glTF editing may save you time production pipeline.
ASTC (Adaptable Scalable Texture Compression) is an exceptionally efficient compression technology, which allows encoding of a wide variety of texture formats at bit-rates of 8 bits per pixel to below 1 bit per pixel. ASTC was contributed by Arm, developed under the cooperative process at Khronos® and is royalty-free when used with Khronos’ OpenGL® ES and Vulkan® APIs. ASTC enables the size of textures used in 3D games and applications to be significantly reduced while being downloaded and stored – saving memory size, access bandwidth and reducing overall application size while retaining high image quality. These benefits are especially valuable on mobile platforms leading to ASTC becoming the most widely used texture compression format for Vulkan and OpenGL ES applications on Android.
glTF™ is a Khronos royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and run-time loading of 3D scenes and models by engines, browsers and applications. glTF minimizes both the size of 3D assets and the runtime processing needed to unpack and use them. glTF has become widely adopted throughout the industry, becoming the equivalent of a ‘JPEG for 3D’. glTF is used by hundreds of content tools and services, streamlining 3D authoring w