Animated models and improved 3D support come to Designer

Hey everyone! 

Today we have successfully deployed our third major update to ZapWorks Designer of 2022, which has vastly improved our 3D support as well as including some really important UX improvements. 

Here are the headlines for 3D:

Playing animated 3d models. This major improvement provides the ability to easily trigger animations embedded within a 3D model in your WebAR experiences. Animation and movement are really important for increasing user engagement with many AR experiences, so this is a really exciting step. 

Support for glTF. We have introduced support for glTF models. This comes in addition to glb files which were already supported. Many 3d models on libraries such as Sketchfab can be downloadable in the glTF format, so this allows you to upload them directly without having to convert them.

Increase max 3D model size. We have increased the maximum size of 3D models that you can upload to 20MB. We received feedback that 10MB was slightly too small for many models that users were trying to upload. We do still recommend that you keep an eye on the total size and performance of your experience though! 

There are also a number of really nice UX improvements as part of today’s release. 

Scene Entity panel. We have introduced a new Scene Entity panel, which allows you to keep track of all of the 3d models, images, videos and buttons that you have part of each scene. You can also easily see which objects have Actions and Transitions applied to them. 

Reordering scenes. The ability to reorder scenes has been added, enabling you to keep your project organised, as well as change the launch scene. 

Keyboard shortcuts. Switch between Move (W), Scale (E) and Rotate (R) when manipulating an object using industry standard keyboard shortcuts. 

Recenter canvas. We have added a button to recenter your canvas for those times when you lose control of your position when building a scene. 

Thank you to all of you that requested these features, and the important feedback you have provided to date. Your contributions are invaluable so please continue to send us any suggestions on what you would like us to work on. 

In the meantime, the team is already hard at work on the next round of updates, so we look forward to sharing those with you in the coming months! ✌️