The BabylonJS open source 3D JavaScript/TypeScript game engine just hit a major and meme-worthy milestone… the release of Babylon.js 5. Thankfully they didn’t let such an opportunity go to waste and this release is jam packed with new features.
Highlights of the 5.0 release include:
- Node Based Material Editor
- Support for WebGPU
- Added Animation Curve Editor to allow easy animation creation and update
- Added GUI Editor to easily build GUI controls
- Added support for ConditionalBlock for NodeMaterial
- Improved performance when using the shadow / cascacaded shadow generator
- Add support for up to 6 uv sets in the standard, PBR and node materials
- Added support for Order Independent Transparency on simple scenes.
scene.useOrderIndependentTransparency = truenow makes transparent meshes shade correctly when stacked onto each other. - Added vertex animation textures with
BakedVertexAnimationManager - Added
MaterialPluginManager - Added Performance Profiler to allow tracking of Performance metrics
- Infinite Morph Targets: When supported (WebGL2+) you are no more limited to 4 morph targets per mesh
- New Space Pirates Demo game and massive documentation improvements
Key Links
Please note if you want to check out WebGPU support you need to run the canary version of Chrome or Edge and enable WebGPU functionality. Once done so, you can check out WebGPU Compute shader examples here.
You can learn more about the Babylon.js 5 release and see it in action in the video below.