Releases & Changelogs

[needle-bot]

Needle Engine Blender Addon 0.51.4

• Fix: resolve asset reference using the data block instead of evaluated representation (e.g. for ChangeMaterialOnClick)
• Fix: Remove component button is disabled if no object is selected

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine Blender Addon 0.51.5

• Fix: HTTP error in updater

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine Blender Addon 0.51.7

• Fix: gather_animation_channel_hook api change for Blender 4.2.2 (LTS)

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[needle-bot]

3.48.3

Needle Engine

• Add: NeedleXRSession.start("ar") support which will start immersive-ar on supported devices or export an interactive USDZ on iOS devices
• Add: nextjs alias plugin
• Fix: Voip on iOS with connected bluetooth device should select the bluetooth device

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine Samples 0.19.7 preview

Added

• FaceFilter support for tracking multiple faces

Changed

• Bump Needle Engine dependency to 3.48.3

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine Samples 0.19.8 preview

Fixed

• FaceFilter: order tracked faces

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine Blender Addon 0.51.8

• Fix: error where texture source in exporter hook is None

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine 3.49.0 beta

Needle Engine

• Add: More jsdoc code API documentation
• Add: OrbitControls can now lerp to a target field of view
• Add: Timeline animation tracks now can have 0..1 weights
• Add: getBoundingBox can now optionally respect a layer mask for determining which objects to include
• Fix: Regression with animations not playing on instantiated objects
• Fix: DeleteBox uses getBoundingBox now instead of a custom implementation
• Fix: Duplicatable now correctly checks for its target object already being deleted
• Fix: vite plugins use vite 5.x API (and are still compatible with 4.x)
• Fix: MX Ink support for QuestOS v71+
• Fix: Some logs where incorrectly not behind debug flags
• Fix: Don’t export cameras in USDZ when requesting QuickLook-compatible assets
• Fix: Exclude childs of ContactShadows and GroundProjectedEnv from USDZ export
• Fix: Custom hand models should not automatically become occluders in Passthrough XR
• Fix: Avoid potential exception in GameObject.getAllComponents(...)
• Fix: Prevent exception in DragControls when dragged object or controller disappear mid-drag
• Fix: Improve EventList usage from pure JS
• Fix: Regression in OrbitControls.autoFit that resulted in a wrong fit in some cases
• Fix: Improve order of batch validation for automatic instancing when some meshes have different attributes
• Change: Needle Menu styles are more consistent now
• Change: Change casing on isiPad(), deprecate isIPad()

Unity Integration

• Change: Bump UnityGLTF dependency to 2.14.0

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine 3.50.0 beta

Needle Engine

• Add: PWA plugin now works with gzip compression
• Add: Asynchronous overload for screenshot2 method that returns a Promise<Blob>
• Add: USDZExporter supports animator.minMaxOffsetNormalized and animation.minMaxOffsetNormalized for QuickLook now
• Add: USDZExporter vertex color export. Use unlit white materials with only vertex colors to export as displayColor without a material. This is supported on iOS 18+ and visionOS 2+.
• Fix: automatically instanced/batched meshes are not exported twice in USDZ anymore.
• Change: “Open in QuickLook” is now “View in AR” to be more consistent
• Change: Deprecate device utilities outside the DeviceUtilities namespace, use the methods directly from the namespace instead (e.g. DeviceUtilities.isSafari())
• Change: legacy Object3D.transform wrapper that returns itself

Unity Integration

• Change: Bump UnityGLTF dependency to 2.14.1

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine # 3.51.0

Needle Engine

• Add: API docs for networking methods
• Add: USDZ export automatically creates “hold” animations now to prevent animation snapping
• Add: USDZ export now supports ShadowCatcher component and materials
• Add: USDZ export now contains more meta-info about exported animations
• Add: Log warnings on USDZ export for overlapping animation roots so hierarchy can be manually adjusted
• Add: Use ?debugusdzbehaviours to log more information and Behaviour Graphs during USDZ export. A graph in mermaid format will be logged into the console, which can be pasted into https://massive-mermaid.glitch.me or other viewers.
• Fix: USDZ animation rounding error edge cases for long-running animations (>20.000 frames)
• Fix: USDZ export only adds physics extension now if required to work around QuickLook issue (FB15925487) for animated objects with physics components
• Fix: USDZ exporter adds rest poses properly again
• Fix: Developer console is now more robust against network errors, e.g. offline PWA usage
• Fix: Canvas parent element size now matches the canvas size

Unity Integration

• Add: Unity 6 compatibility
• Add: add some missing Deploy To component icons
• Remove: WebGL1 custom shader export

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine Blender Addon 0.52.0

• Fix: Blender 4.3 plugin hooks

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine # 3.51.1

Needle Engine

• Fix: DragControls snap to surface setting should use world normal
• Fix: Needle Menu missing focus-visible for overflow menu button
• Fix: Needle Menu :focus-visible on menu elements barely being visible
• Fix: edge case where we still showed the QR code when only the WebXR component is on and we’re on mobile
• Fix: detect URL content format using “Content-Type” header as well
• Fix: double quotes in USDZ displayName need to be escaped
• Fix: don’t fetch when we already know fetch won’t work due to cross-origin isolation
• Change: for QuickLook, use “View in AR” instead of “Download for AR” even for cases where we’re not sure if the device actually supports QuickLook – rel=“ar” is not reliable
• Change: disable Needle logo being clickable during loading because users click it accidentally and then they’re lost
• Docs: add @group Component to components since TypeDoc doesn’t do inheritance as expected

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine 4.0.0 alpha

Needle Engine

• Add: Builds can now be compressed on Needle Cloud instead of locally. Set the NEEDLE_CLOUD_TOKEN environment variable to your Cloud access token to enable this. This allows running compression in CI build pipelines, for example in a Github Action. Needle Cloud access tokens can be obtained on Needle Cloud.
• Add: DropListener now optionally supports networking when allowNetworking is on. Dropped files will be network-synced if the file size does not exceed a certain size (50 MB for projects on paid plans; 5 MB for projects free plans).
• Fix: Previously, when changing a @syncField property, only the last changed property was synchronized to the server. This is now fixed. Note that this is a breaking change: previously networked server state with the @syncField attribute in Needle Engine 3.x projects will not be loaded in Needle Engine 4.0.
• Change: EventList now takes a generic type code hints when using myEventList.addEventListener(...) e.g. new EventList<string>()
• Change: The default networking server is now located at networking.needle.tools
• Change: The DropListener API has changed
• Change: OrbitControls useKeys is now false by default since the underlying three.js OrbitControls incorrectly capture ALL keyboard events on the page.
• Change: Loading speed improvements and improved Lighthouse score
• Change: md5 hashing results are now S3-compatible

Unity Integration

• Add: Projects can now be deployed to Needle Cloud directly from Unity. Needle Cloud supports build versioning, tagging, sharing and more. Learn more at https://cloud.needle.tools.
• Change: License authentication is now much easier and uses Needle Cloud authentication

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine # 3.51.2

Unity Integration

• Fix: Don’t show update dialogue for newly available alpha versions

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine 4.0.1 alpha

Needle Engine

• Fix: Objects spawned with syncedInstantiate should automatically be removed when disconnecting from the networking room
• Fix: Issue where objects rendered with instancing enabled were not visible in screenshots

Unity Integration

• Change: Update Editor UI styles

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine 4.0.2 alpha

Needle Engine

• Add: Support for custom scripts on WebXR custom hands
• Fix: OrbitControls should not listen to window.body for key events

Unity Integration

• Add: Basic WebXR hand models and assign as default models in the XRControllerModel script

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine Blender Addon 0.52.1

• Fix: Issue where restarting the server would fail

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine 4.0.3 alpha

Needle Engine

• Add: OBJLoader now automatically loads mtl files
• Add: OBJLoader materials are now fixed like FBX materials

Unity Integration

• Add: NeedleCloudAsset component. Initial version to load Needle Cloud into the Unity Editor and Needle Engine runtime. To use just add the NeedleCloudAsset component to a GameObject in Unity.
• Fix: EDU license handling

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine 4.0.4 alpha

Needle Engine

• Fix: Detecting OBJ files starting with mtllib or content-type header model/obj
• Fix: Issue where screenshot() method with custom camera and postprocessing didn’t work
• Update gltf-progressive package to load higher texture LODs by default

Unity Integration

• Add: NeedleCloudAsset component password field

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[needle-bot]

Needle Engine 4.1.0 alpha

Needle Engine

• Add: Screenshot support for AR:
  To use you need to request the camera-access XR feature when starting a new XR session.
  For that you can either simply add the WebARCameraBackground component to your scene
  or add the feature in the NeedleXRSession.onSessionRequestStart event hook.

Unity Integration

• Add: Get AI Help for converting C# to typescript
  We added a small UI label above C# components that do not yet have a matching Needle Engine component. Clicking this label will ask the AI for how the component can be translated to typescript.
• Add: “Explain with AI” component context menu in Needle Engine/Explain with AI

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Get started Samples