If you want Cocos Creator 3.5.1, please download it from the Cocos Dashboard.
This update has the usual bug fixes you expect, but we are also adding two new experimental features that we hope to develop more in Cocos Creator 3.6. This includes a new FBX smart material conversion and a new surface shader.
We also have been updating the API documentation even more since the 3.5 release. So it should get better and better as we move towards improving the complete documentation for the engine in English. We hope in the future to translate to new languages when at an acceptable quality and help more developers in other non-English and non-Chinese speaking countries.
If you want a more detailed look at the engine, you can look at the developer notes in our forums.
Experimental: FBX Smart Material Conversion
FBX Smart Material Conversion is a feature in the model importer that assists in converting materials. It maps some of the standard materials exported from various DCC tools directly to Cocos Creator's built-in materials, restoring as much as possible the material effects seen by the artist in the DCC tools. This feature supports some of the standard materials in mainstream DCC tools: 3DS Max, Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D.
You can compare the effect of the Standard Surface material in Maya after importing it into Cocos Creator:
For more information on how to use this feature, please refer to the documentation.
Experimental: New Surface Shader
Since version 3.0, many developers have experienced the problem of materials not working properly during the upgrade process. The root cause of this problem is that the engine's lighting model and surface material calculations are being adjusted along the way, which affects all related material effect codes and also affects the compatibility of these materials when reused by users.
In order to improve the compatibility of the material system, we have added a series of Surface Shader resources that abstract the lighting model and surface material calculations in the engine, so that future developers can use these built-in headers and functions to greatly simplify the effect resources they write. At the same time, due to the abstraction, cross-version compatibility will also be more secure.
Please refer to the documentation for more details on the use of Surface Shader.
If you want Cocos Creator 3.5.1, please download it from the Cocos Dashboard.
