What's New in 6.5?

Major Builder Features

With this release, we added a lot of features for making short films with Blocksmith! This is a major update that offers several highly-requested new tools which you can explore below.
New users: You can download and try the Builder software for your platform here.

Camera Object

A camera object can now be added to scenes from the Special tab, and can used for video recordings. Such a simple object may not sound like a major change, but these are just a few possibilities that it allows:

  • Using Blocksmith for movie-making

  • 2D/2.5D games

  • 3rd Person Characters

  • Controllable Vehicles

  • Showing camera feeds on video objects to simulate surveillance cameras

  • Making in-game cutscenes

  • Creating 2D menus and UI

  • Transitioning from 2D to 3D views and back

Animated (silent) Conversation between Characters

2D "Space Invaders"

Controllable Drone

2D to 3D scene transition

3rd Person Character Controller made in Blocksmith

There are more features packed into this awesome version! Here are some other new tools:

3rd Person Characters and Accessing Player Movement

When a Player's view is attached to a camera which is then "held" by the player themselves, you can simulate a "3rd person" or "over the shoulder" view.

Or you can forward the Player's controls completely to a new object using new events, and thus have a "vehicle" that you can control!

Curved Animations

For the movie-making side of things, we wanted to allow for very smooth curved animations. So we added the ability to curve animation lines! Any animation can now be set to "curved", which gives you a mid-point you can adjust and curve the animation with.

Direct Ready Player Me Integration

We are continuously improving our Ready Player Me integration with the Builder, so characters are easier to add to scenes than ever before! Not only do can you add them directly from the Builder now, but they are even more performance friendly and advanced with their lip-sync and facial animations.

Sky Rotation

Ever needed the sun, sky and scene shadows to face another direction? We found ourselves rotating entire scenes just to have a different view of the sky, so instead we allowed users to rotate the sky itself!

More Website Features

We also made some highly-requested improvements on the website.

Re-submit experiences for Quests

Ever have students mistakenly submit the wrong experience for a Quest? Now students can re-submit experiences for Quests. Ideally, educators will have a much easier time making sure students have submitted their correct work!

Cookies, Ads and Comments

We started experimenting with showing ads for non-paying users on some of our pages. To support that we changed our cookie behavior and added opt-out options for non EU users (EU users are automatically opted out). We also introduced an option to disable comments for specific experiences