We’re excited to share a major round of updates to Gorilla3D in version 1.3.0.3815.
This release brings broad new format support, a modern shadow system, significant physics improvements, and a large number of stability fixes across all supported rendering backends (OpenGL, Vulkan, and Metal) and platforms.
Below you’ll find a summary of the most important new features followed by the key bug fixes. As always, we recommend updating to the latest version to benefit from these improvements.
Installation via our Installer Tool: https://gorilla3d.de/download/Gorilla3DInstaller.zip
or by manual download via:
- Florence (13.0 – 13.1): https://gorilla3d.de/files/?dir=packages/13.1.0
- Athens (12.0 – 12.3): https://gorilla3d.de/files/?dir=packages/12.3.0
- Alexandria (11.3): https://gorilla3d.de/files/?dir=packages/11.3.0
✨ New Features
Model Formats & Asset Pipeline
- Full USD support — import and export of USD, USDC, USDZ, and USDA files, including materials, textures, vertex groups, and skinned animations (verified in Blender and USDView).
- glTF / GLB exporter added, complementing the existing importer, f.e. skin/skeleton-animations
- glTF KHR_specular extension support for more accurate physically based materials.
- Redesigned Assets Manager with a modern look & feel and a dockable design-time panel for managing model assets directly inside the IDE.
Rendering & Lighting
- Cascaded Shadow System (CSM) — high-quality, sharp shadows with automatic cascade fitting, global shadow strength control, and support for directional, point, and spot lights (Win32/Win64 only at the moment).
- Per-object shadow control — enable or disable shadow casting individually on any mesh or model via the new CastShadows property.
- Improved underwater rendering — fish-eye look, wavy distortion, coloring, transitions, and simple caustics.
- Terrain generation with a base-mesh generator and a new DisplacementEdgeFade option for seamless tiling.
Animation
- Animation Blending for smooth transitions between animation clips.
Physics (Q3 Driver)
- New collider types: cylinder, cone, and convex hull.
- Reworked joints & constraints for more realistic behavior (includes a new physics-joints demo).
- Greatly improved character controller — reliable ground following, jumping, slope handling, and a new ModelYawOffset property to calibrate model facing direction.
Cameras & Interaction
- Head-Tracking Camera for parallax 3D effects, with a new custom projection-matrix option.
- Hand tracking (initial support)
- Smooth Camera Controller can now toggle smoothing on/off, with improved design-time navigation.
- a new Skill-System overlay.
- Inventory parameters with typed serialization support.
- Design-time editors for a faster in-IDE workflow.
🐞 Bug Fixes & Stability
Vulkan
- Corrected normal-map / texture formats and component swapping.
- Fixed frustum culling, particle rendering/blending, 3D textures, nearest-neighbor filtering, and PostFX/FXAA chaining.
Metal
- Fixed FXAA, textureLod translation, emissive blur, and added PostFX render-pass support.
Model Import
- Numerous FBX animation fixes for smooth, jitter-free playback (correct absolute/relative transforms, vertex groups).
- glTF/GLB animation and texture-set fixes, correct opaque/translucency detection, and corrected sub-mesh orientation.
- Correct handling of models with multiple armature roots.
Materials & Shading
- PBR shader fixes for over-shaded areas, premultiplied-alpha issues, and correct two-sided normal handling.
- Two-sided normal flipping now also applied to Lambert/Phong/Blinn materials, so double-sided models render correctly.
- Water material fixes: reflections, refraction, displacement, ripples, and correct above/below-surface orientation.
- Fixed dark tile edges caused by texture wrapping.
- Shader noise/hash functions reworked to be safe on all GPUs (including ARM Mali).
Physics
- Fixed objects sinking into or tunneling through terrain, mid-air freezes, and jump/gravity issues.
- Improved capsule, sphere, box, and mesh collision stability and correct inertia handling.
Design-Time & IDE
- Fixed Assets Manager crashes and dockable-panel restoration after project reloads.
- Resolved flickering of 2D FMX components inside the viewport.
- Restored viewport hotkeys (G/F/T/R/S) and improved mouse-wheel navigation.
- Fixed loading of USD models within asset packages at design time.
Audio
- FMOD and OpenAL playlist fixes (position change, next/previous track, track-length detection) and design-time stability.
Platform Compatibility
- Android 16 fixes (procedural skybox, particle scaling, gesture control).
- Restored compatibility with Delphi 11.3 and 10.1.
We hope you enjoy these updates. As always, thank you for using Gorilla3D — your feedback continues to shape the engine.
