Hi p3d.in-ers, we're naming our biggest release so far in honor of the most massive planet in the solar system: Jupiter! We're literally giggling in excitement to present you with the latest delivery of awesomeness from the team so start scrolling down and don't forget to breath!
Be sure to switch to a plus account for free to enjoy all the new features!
The quick tour:
The details:
Multimaterial Support Is Here!
Yes! Our #1 feature request of all time is ready. p3d.iners from the game art world are usually happy with using a single material and texture slot for an entire model, that's just how they roll! However for lots of us this limitation has been a bit of a pain to work around.. Luckily p3d.in says goodbye to this problem by supporting multiple materials per model!
Using Multiple Materials
By default p3d.in will assign a different material to every facegroup in you model. Simply select each slot and start tweaking your shader settings and loading your textures.
Using a Single Material
In case your model contains multiple facegroups but you still want to assign only one material to the whole model switch your material mode to Single.
New Shader Candy!
Harvesting the benefits of our new Material system we have added new fun features that will surely help you better show off your modeling and texturing skills on p3d.in.
ShadeSpheres™
Oh we love this one! ShadeSpheres are one of those very simple techniques that can produce great visual results. You basically take a small image of a sphere representing the shading of a material. When applied to your model it produces a beautiful and fast representation of almost any material you can imagine!
To introduce this feature we're launching a collection of 36 ShadeSpheres created by the p3d.in team and by our talented friends John Seymour aka 'bio-designer', David Silverman aka 'silvermindyarr' and Pablo Vazquez aka 'venomgfx'. We're having too much fun playing with the default set but of course you can upload your own too!
Plain color inputs
Any channel (where it makes sense) will allow you to pick a base color, this base color will also blend with the same channel's texture if present.
Bump Maps PLUS
Aside from normal maps we can now enjoy good ol' grayscale bump maps to give our models that extra detail! Bump maps are actually quite special since they are lots of times faster than normal maps to calculate so use them to your heart's content!
Specular Glossiness PLUS
Our material editor has long offered the possibility to texture the specular color and intensity. Now we have added texture control for the glossiness factor. With this we can make materials that vary their glossiness along their surface.
Find it quickly
When your gallery becomes massive don't think about scrolling to find that one model. p3d.in now provides a set of simple tools to help you organize and find your models.
Search
Type in a few characters from your model's title and watch how the interactive gallery filters your results. Combine any number of keywords for broadening your search.
Tags
The new tagging functionality is very useful for organizing models according to their project, type, client, progress status, you name it.. simply go to your model settings, type in a new tag and save, now you can use the search functionality to easily find your tagged models. Highly flexible!
As a classic p3d.in touch all of this functionality is exposed to the URL so you can actually share your filtered gallery with others!
Share it
Sharing and embedding is at the heart of what p3d.in is. From the embed code generator to the actual embed viewer every bit has been rethought to allow for easier than ever sharing, fully configurable controls and better integration with forums and galleries. Embed now defaults to a click to load behavior (which can be changed to autoload from the embed code generator). This will make forums, galleries and other pages containing lots of models faster.
We have payed special attention in not breaking any existing embed, however to fully benefit from the new embed features we recomend taking a look at the latest iframe code and updating it in your site.
Forums
In an effort to unify the experience between different sites and communities we have also created detailed instructions on how to add p3d.in embed support for all major forum software! If you manage a 3D community then join us! It takes 5 mins!
Redesigned Experience
When you look at p3d.in's interface it's easy to notice the key concepts of simplicity and cleanness, however we will not sacrifice completeness, power and flexibility. Challenge accepted!
Seamless Navigation
We love when things just work and do it fast! We're taking this approach to every corner of p3d.in, from materials editing to settings management and more. The interface has been divided in 2 collapsible sidebars and nothing more, leaving the maximum amount of space to the canvas so you can focus on your models and gallery. You will enjoy this familiar sidebars when visiting the documentation, glancing at your models or any other sections of the site.
"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!"
Details can end up making a big difference. We have fixed and improved so many parts of p3d.in's software and hardware that it would be pointless to list them all. We thank you for the great interest and feedback that has made it all possible. Keep it coming!
This is far from being all that's new on Jupiter but for now go play already!
p3d.in - your 3D online!
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