October 05 2006
Cortona3D Newsletter, issue 5

in this issue:

New product release

Cortona® Viewer 5.0

Cortona Viewer 5.0

Cortona3D, a leader in the provision of interactive 3D-powered solutions, today releases Cortona® Viewer 5.0 to bring the company's product range to a new level.

Cortona has been playing multiple roles in the development of organizations' technologies. Initially designed as an interactive 3D plug-in for Internet browsers, Cortona soon surpassed these requirements and became a powerful 3D visualization tool, now incorporated in all Cortona3D authoring tools in various business areas such as training, product maintenance and support, distribution of spare parts and visualization of scientific data. Cortona is also widely used within third party products and thousands of people visit the Cortona3D website each day to download Cortona. The users range from world-wide enterprises to small research and educational institutions.

Cortona Viewer 5.0 introduces a range of innovative features that will benefit both developers and ordinary web users. These include support for advanced visual effects and realistic surfaces (DirectX shaders), new interactive features (layers), and improved performance (renewed rendering algorithms). Cortona 5.0 now supports the latest hardware accelerators (DirectX 9.x.).

Cortona 5.0 also offers new opportunities for developers of Web applications. Its powerful programming interfaces, previously provided only for Internet Explorer are now also available for Netscape Browser, Mozilla, and Firefox. This allows for the creation of universal 3D content and the expansion of target audiences.

New features in Cortona Viewer 5.0

Layers

Layers allow the author to create rectangular areas in the 3D scene. They can be used for the creation of menus, head-up displays, and different views of the same scene.

DirectX 9.0 shaders

Cortona Viewer now supports DirectX 9.0 shaders which allow for the creation of realistic 3D surfaces and advanced visual effects.

Rendering speed improvement

The rendering speed of complex dynamic 3D models has been increased due to the improved rendering algorithms and improved handling of the scene graph.

Adjusting texture size

The user can now limit the texture size to speed up the rendering. Available values include 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024 and 2048x2048 pixels.

Properties of Cortona Control and VRML Automation

• The methods and properties of the VRML Automation interface are now available for Mozilla Firefox and Netscape 8.x.
• PROTO and EXTERNPROTO now can be distinguished. The new EXTERNPROTO object includes the URLs and LoadedUrl properties.
• The following properties have been added to Cortona Control: Version, RendererMaxTextureSize, PixelBufferAccess.

JavaScript

The developer can now reuse Existing PROTOs with the help of the Cortona_CreateVrmlFromUrl function

Display of the logo in the 3D window

The Cortona logo is now displayed in the bottom right-hand corner of the 3D window. The users can hide the Cortona logo or replace it with their own logo by obtaining the appropriate Cortona license.

New VRML extensions

• The Panel and HTMLText extensions allow the user to create 2D labels or information panels in the 3D window to display formatted text.
• OrderedGroup allows the user to set the order of the rendering of coplanar or close shapes.
• TransformSensor tracks changes of its ancestor Transform nodes and allows for getting transformations in the world's coordinate system.
• EventUtilities nodes (BooleanFilter, BooleanToggle, BooleanTrigger, IntegerSequencer, IntegerTrigger, TimeTrigger) allow for handling numerous event-types for interactive scenes without the use of a Script node.
• The load field in the Inline node specifies if a resource corresponding to the url field should be loaded or not.