Sceneform 1.7pr2

This release of Filament is a check point release towards Sceneform 1.7.

List of changes since sceneform-1.7pr1:

Features

Engine

• View::setFrontFaceWindingInverted can be used to change the winding order of front faces. This is useful for mirrored rendering (reflections, etc.)
• Added View::setRenderQuality API. It currently allows the use of an R11G11B10F HDR color buffer instead of RGB[A]16F
• Added the ability to set the polygon offset on a material instance
• Added API to compute tangent frame from vertex data (in VertexBuffer)

Materials

• Use getUserTime() to get the current time in seconds. See Renderer::resetUserTime() for more information

Tools

• matc features are now part of libfilamat to generate materials at runtime
• resgen tool to embed data in binaries (pre-compiled materials, etc.)

Samples

• Samples: snorm16 UVs if UVs are in the range -1..1
• Samples: New webpack/TypeScript demos
• Samples: Added gltf_viewer sample

Enhancements

Engine

• Improved skinning memory usage
• Improved job system performance
• Set CPU affinity on job system threads on Android to avoid core hopping/cache thrashing
• Froxelization now runs during the shadow pass for improved parallelism
• Lights culling is now parallelized with renderables culling
• Various performance and code size optimizations
• Use compile-time hashing in StaticString

Materials

• Shader optimizations are now on by default
• Shader optimizations can now be applied to materials that use external textures
• Use smol-v to compress SPIR-V shaders

Android

• Android: API level requirement on Android was lowered from 24 to 21
• Android: Reduced the size of the release AAR by ~150 KiB
• Android: UiHelper can now create transparent render targets
• Android: Added a transparent render target demo

Web

• The JavaScript API now supports compressed textures
• Disabled depth prepass in the WebGL builds

Distribution

• Linux CI builds are now compiled with clang 7.0 instead of clang 5.0

Bug fixes

Engine

• Fixed overflow issue when exactly 256 bones were declared in a renderable
• Fixed potential crash when copying a texture stream
• FADE materials are now properly sorted with TRANSPARENT materials

Vulkan

• Fixed mipmapping of 2D textures
• Fixed validation warning
• Fixed texture anisotropy in the Vulkan backend
• Depth offset and face culling now work