Mozilla is committed to the next wave of creativity in the open Web, in which people can access, create and share immersive VR and AR experiences across platforms and devices. Together with the Khronos Group and developers of existing open source Blender tools, we are providing a complete GL Transmission Format (glTF) import and export add-on for Blender, offering a powerful and free round-trip workflow for WebXR creators. This effort builds on the work of existing open source tools, and adds support for the newest Blender and glTF features. The tool itself along with further technical details will be available in the coming weeks. The blueprint for the collaboration model that allowed us to get there already exists. This article will explain how we got there, how this model works, and why it can accelerate the ecosystem.

If you’re coding 3D visualizations with Three.js, sooner or later you’ll want to move beyond using the library’s basic native shapes to using complex custom 3D shapes wrapped in UV mapped material. Since Three.js dropped support of its Blender exporter plugin in favor of relying on its glTF loader, exporting via the popular and versatile glTF file format is now the way to go for bringing Blender objects into your Three.js projects. This tutorial will walk through each step from creating a Three.js-compatible UV-wrapped 3D object in Blender to loading the object into a Three.js scene.

Vizard 6, the new version of the VR development platform for researchers from WorldViz now offers support for glTF. On the graphics side, Vizard embraced the new 3D model format glTF, which improves graphics rendering and provides new and simplified workflows out of Revit, Solidworks, Maya, Blender, SketchUp, Substance Painter, Modo, and more, as well as access to over 150,000 models in Sketchfab’s library.

Unreal Engine 4.19 preview has a experimental importer for glTF. This is an open format, that, once final, should work better than FBX, and actually work great with Blender. The Unreal Engine forums mentions that “Right now its much superior to FBX for some simple cases. The cool point about glTF is that the same file holds a full scene, with multiple 3d objects, each of them with animation, and each of them with materials, and each material actually imports as a material graph, and with textures.” Take a look and tell us what you think.

Recently Khronos posted a guest blog ‘Art Pipeline for glTF’ by Patrick Ryan from Microsoft. This covered getting started with authoring content to glTF. A little more in-depth is a post by Don McCurdy on ‘Creating animated glTF Characters with Mixamo and Blender’. The post walks the reader through their workflow using Blender, Mixamo to rig, animate, and export a character to glTF.

The Khronos Group is presenting today Mastering the Khronos Blender glTF 2.0 Exporter webinar. Open to all, the webinar will be held online on at 10am Pacific time. This 1-hour webinar will be presented by the people who developed the exporter, and we’ll of course end with a Q&A session. glTF 2.0.

Non-profit organization The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.79, an update to its cross-platform, open-source 3D graphics tool. The new build further improves its Cycles Rendering feature, bringing feature parity with NVIDIA CUDA and improved performance to AMD OpenCL hardware.

The glTF working group has announced that the Blender glTF 2.0 exporter documentation is complete… for now. Take a look, and if anything is not clear, or you see errors or improvements, please create a pull request or raise an issue on Github.

Blender glTF 2.0 Exporter is now feature complete. The team is looking for testers and asks that any bugs found to be reported.

Radeon ProRender is a powerful physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images. Built on efficient, high-performance Radeon Rays technology, Radeon ProRender’s complete, scalable ray tracing engine uses open industry standards to harness GPU and CPU performance for swift, impressive results. One of those open industry standards is OpenCL 1.2. AMD’s requirements state: “Hardware agnostic – if your computer can run OpenCL 1.2, it can run Radeon ProRender.” Download the Windows or Linux version directly or learn more about Radeon Pro.

Khronos has released a developer preview version of glTF 2.0 that brings significant enhancements to the open standard for runtime 3D asset delivery. For example, glTF 2.0 introduces physically-based rendering (PBR) for portable, high-quality materials - making glTF independent of the underlying 3D API. Khronos is seeking input and feedback from the industry via GitHub to help finalize glTF 2.0 in the next few weeks. Khronos has also today released a request for quotations on a funded project to bring glTF 2.0 export capability to the open-source Blender 3D Authoring Tool. Find out how to share feedback and get more details.

Blender 2.78 comes with lots of improvements to the Cycles render engine, including support for CPU groups, support for Nvidia GTX 10×0, along with better support for Nvidia GTX 980 Ti and Nvidia Titan X GPUs, OpenCL and CUDA memory improvements.

Blend4Web is a new WebGL framework for authoring and interactive rendering of three-dimensional graphics and audio in browsers. The platform is intended for creating visualizations, presentations, online-shops, games and other rich internet applications, and is integrated tightly with Blender (hence the name).

Blender Foundation and Blender community members will be participating in Siggraph 2012 - Los Angeles. Starting on Sunday, August 5, 2:00pm, the Blender Community Meeting BOF, followed by the Blender Artist/Developer Showcase BOF at 4pm. You can always find Blender in the Convention Center, main hall, booth 212. Here you will find Blender artists and developers and Ton Roosendaal for three days. Drop by if you like to see the latest in Blender, or just to hang-out and chat with other Blender folks.

The Blender development team has released Blender version 2.60. Blender 2.60 incorporates 3D audio as well as restoration of sequence editor proxy support, vertex group modifiers, animation system improvements in the graph and dopesheet editor, improved Collada integration, added callbacks in the Python API, new add-ons, and better localisation and internationalisation support.