We have made significant changes in our WebGL rendering engine called FRAK. New version will be FRAK 2 and it can be tested in beta version with all 3D Wayfinder projects.

FRAK engine is a JavaScript library/API for creating interactive 3D applications using WebGL. The purpose of the library is to provide a framework for simplifying the creation of complex interactive 3D applications. It has been built for 3D Wayfinder and it is optimized for showing 3D building models in web applications. FRAK is open source and the code can be found in Github.

New features in FRAK 2 are:
• New deferred rendering engine
• Option for more lights and light sources
• Better performance
• Physically based rendering
FRAK engine was developed by 3D Technologies R&D for 3D Wayfinder. 3D Wayfinder is a floor plan visualization and content management platform, mainly used for wayfinding applications.

Deferred rendering is an alternative approach to rendering 3D scenes. Deferred rendering has been option in 3D Wayfinder besides forward rendering for quite a long time, but it has not been used much. The classic (Forward rendering) rendering approach involves rendering each object and applying lighting passes to it. So, if an object is affected by 5 lights, it will be rendered 5 times, once for each light, in order to accumulate the effect of each light. With FRAK 2 there is only one rendering option which is based on Deferred rendering, but it is now much faster and without lights it works as forward rendering before.

Physically based rendering is for GLTF 3D models. Physically based materials are different type of materials, that can use reflections, metal-look etc.
New features like image-based lightning, dynamic shadows etc are coming also in near future.

How to test FRAK 2?

So far, the FRAK 2 can be tested with “development” template. This means that if you replace the template (for example “Default”) in project URL with “development” you can see the 3D maps rendered with FRAK 2 WebGL engine. With larger models it will give significant performance increase in FPS thanks to optimizations we have made.