April April April, here we are! A cool month again for Naker, still a lot of you are joining the community and we will soon reach the number of 1000 designers using Naker 😍. That motivates us to give the best we can and always deliver new features depending on your needs. Here are the ones we focused on during April.
COLLABORATION 👪
As the number of users grows, the need for collaboration started to emerge. Even between us in the Naker’s team, we felt the need to do that on some specific project. So being able to work as a team around a project is a huge improvement for Naker. It meant a lot of challenges and difficulties but we are happy we made those efforts. We are very looking forward to having your feedback on it.
First to do that many tools like us added the possibilities to create a team which works like an additional account with an additional dashboard. At Naker, we think this would mean more complexity to have to manage your personal account and a team account. Plus it would become even more complex if you would work in several teams as you will have to switch between them all the time.
In order to keep it simple, we stayed focus on projects only. Because generally, you will feel the need to collaborate around one specific project and most of the time your team can change on every different project. Thus we add the collaboration inputs in the project creation/update modal. There you will find a search in order to add other Naker user to join your project and collaborate with you.
BABYLONJS V4.0.0 AND TREE SHAKING 🌲
For those of you how don’t know BABYLONJS yet, this is a very powerful 3D Engine Naker uses as a base to draw 3D directly in your browser. The BABYLONJS team just released a fantastic version, the V4.0.0. Of course, Naker is among the first one to use that update. The V4.0.0 will allow you to go even further in term of creation and they have made a lot of optimization making the Intale (Interactive Digital Tales) always smoother. What it means for you is that all your last and updated projects will be using that optimized version of BABYLONJS without doing anything special.
Then what we also did is using tree shaking which allows us to load only the part of BABYLONJS which we use instead of the all library. Thus we managed to lose more than a third of the weight of our Intale viewer. Thanks to that improvement, your Intale will be faster to load on any device. You can follow the step of that optimization here.
As we use a different version of BABYLONJS and as we also have our specific change on our Intale viewer, we had to create our own versioning so that you can update your project without breaking anything.
SPOT AND DIRECTIONAL LIGHTS 🚨
One cool feature we added here is the possibility to choose the type of your lights. For now, we were only using Point light. Basically, this is a light source which will enlighten everything around it. With Point light, you can do all the basic stuff but we wanted to add more flexibility.
First, the Spot light as it says will only enlighten a specific area and not everywhere unlike the Point light. As you can see in the video above, the light goes in a specific direction and then with animation on light rotation, we make it move from left to right. This way you can make a cool effect like if there was a lighthouse or a police car light.
Secondly, the Directional light is basically the sun. A light which comes from very far away and thus which will enlight your entire scene. This one is very useful when you don’t want to bother with a specific light or when you have an outdoor scene. and then if you animate it, you can make some cool light effect like a sunrise or a sunset.
CONCLUSION
Again we are always looking for feedback so do not hesitate to talk with us with the chat, we will be happy to answer you.
If you have difficulties using the Naker editor, we also make some demo sessions, you can book one on my agenda. 📅
Go check one of the last we made with Naker for HTC here!
