Winsage
March 27, 2026
Babylon.js 9.0 has been released, marking the most extensive update to date, featuring new tools and enhancements for web developers. Key features include:
- Clustered Lighting: Accelerates per-pixel lighting calculations by grouping lights into screen-space tiles and depth slices, improving performance in scenes with many lights.
- Textured Area Lights: Area lights now support emission textures, allowing images to be used as light sources for realistic lighting effects.
- Node Particle Editor: A visual tool for creating complex particle systems using a non-destructive node graph interface.
- Particle Flow Maps and Attractors: Introduces flow maps for controlling particle movement and gravity attractors for dynamic effects.
- Volumetric Lighting: A system for realistic light scattering through fog and haze, with configurable parameters for artistic control.
- Frame Graph: A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) system for managing the rendering pipeline, optimizing GPU memory usage by over 40%.
- Animation Retargeting: Allows animations from one character to be applied to another with different skeleton structures, enabling animation sharing across diverse characters.
- Advanced Gaussian Splat Support: Enhancements for Gaussian Splatting, including support for multiple file formats, shadow casting, and the ability to create and modify splat data programmatically.
These features enhance the capabilities of Babylon.js for creating immersive web experiences.
