Our mission is to create one of the most powerful, beautiful, and simple web rendering engines in the world. Our passion is to make it completely open and free for everyone.

Today we are proud to introduce the latest evolution of the Babylon Platform, the amazingly simple Babylon.js 4.2.

We are artists, developers, creators, and dreamers and we want to make it as simple as possible to enable everyone to bring their ideas to life. With this new version of Babylon.js, we set out to make it even easier to develop with. From a ton of new tools, to improved workflows and features, new documentation and more, it is our sincere hope that Babylon.js 4.2 …

Think back to those halcyon days when video games came on cartridges, controllers were square, and televisions were big, rounded, and weighed nearly as much as a fully loaded pickup truck. The days when computational speed was measured in megahertz, and when television was fuzzy pixels dancing across curved screens illuminated by cathode rays that may or may not have permanently damaged our eyes. Ahhh the memories…

We can’t bring back the past, but through the magic of shaders and math, we can try to emulate some of the artifacts of this bygone era to give your games that warm, fuzzy feeling you know you’ve…

One of my personal hills, that I’m ready to die for, is the opportunity to improve JavaScript by adding better threading support. So far the current state of that support is pretty limited to using WebWorkers which unfortunately cannot be as powerful as threads are in languages like C++ or C#.

I do not want to blame the browser vendors though, because this topic is quite complex and can come with a lot of pain.

That being said and with the current way of working in JavaScript, we can still feel a bit of what multithreading can be thanks to Promises (and asynchronous functions). …

Full disclosure: I am a technical artist working for Microsoft on the Babylon.js engine. In the past, however, I have worked full time in the Unity engine on projects for HoloLens, 3D for Everyone, and Real-Time 3D Scanning. So what is it like to move from a native engine like Unity to a WebGL engine like Babylon.js? It was not as jarring as I would have initially thought.

First of all, we need to acknowledge that comparing a native 3D engine to a WebGL engine is not an apples to apples comparison. There are limitations on WebGL that are not an issue for a native engine, but on the flip side the accessibility of a WebGL experience is much broader than a native app. If you are making an experience that is targeted to a specific piece of hardware, being able to leverage a native engine is going to give you a lot of flexibility. …

Ok let’s get something out of the way, right out of the gate. This post is not for the faint of heart, we’re going to dive into something fairly mind-bending, but don’t give up…stay with me and I promise you’ll have some fun!

When Babylon.js introduced the Node Material Editor in version 4.1, it was a complete game changer for me. It’s like someone handed me a car when I had been crawling for my entire life.

Babylon.js is mostly widely thought of as a full game engine. However, what about creating other kinds of experiences? While thinking about this topic and trying to have fun learning something new, I took a shot at creating a simple but fancy drawing canvas with Babylon.js. The goal being to have a “Shiny Unicorn Poop” brush because… why not?

Without any further ado, have fun trying the Live Demo.

The entire code of the project is, as usual, open source and available on Github:

In this post, I will only try to focus on a handful of techniques that you might be able to reuse in creating your own experiences. …

Developing a video game is hard--at least, it’s harder than one would expect. There are a lot of moving parts that go into developing one: coding, visuals, music and sound, testing, etc. That’s why, when I see an indie game come up on places like the Babylon.js Forums, itch.io, or other places, I’m always in awe of it. Whether it’s a single person or a whole team, I know that a lot of effort went into that game. A game needs a game loop and logic, plenty of visual assets (especially for 3D games), sound effects and music, a method of distribution, etc. Now, the reason I’m bringing this up isn’t to discourage anyone from making games but to illustrate just how much effort it takes to get something playable. Next, you have to add the idea that it has to be FUN. …

Texturing is one of the most powerful steps in the 3D content creation workflow. Textures can add rich detail to even very simple meshes. However, they can also be abstract and difficult to reason about. Textures are mapped to the surface of a 3D image using UV coordinates in ways that are not always intuitive. The color data of the texture — numbers representing “red”, “blue”, “green”, and “alpha” channels — can be used to represent features like “metalness” or “roughness” rather than visible color. …