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Announcing Babylon.js 9.0

by ailona•

Babylon.js 9.0 delivers major rendering advances: clustered lighting, textured area lights, node particle editor, volumetric lighting, frame graph, animation retargeting, enhanced Gaussian splatting, particle flow and attractors, improving performance and authoring across WebGPU and WebGL2.

Babylon.js 9.0 launches with major rendering, lighting, particle, and tooling upgrades for the web. This release focuses on performance, flexibility, and production-ready features for WebGPU and WebGL2 users.

Main feature and impact

Babylon.js 9.0 introduces Clustered Lighting, Volumetric Lighting, and a v1 Frame Graph. Clustered Lighting limits per-pixel light calculations to relevant lights, improving frame rates on dense-light scenes. The Frame Graph enables fine-grained pipeline control and substantial GPU memory savings through intelligent resource reuse. Volumetric Lighting adds realistic light scattering with compute-accelerated performance and WebGL fallbacks.

Practical implications

Developers can render complex scenes with hundreds or thousands of lights at interactive rates. New area lights accept emission textures for physically accurate panel and stained-glass effects. The Node Particle Editor, flow maps, and attractors provide reusable, artist-driven particle workflows. Animation retargeting enables sharing animation libraries across diverse skeletons and character rigs without manual pose fixes.
“We are thrilled to announce that mission takes a monumental leap forward with the release of Babylon.js 9.0.”
Babylon.js 9.0 also expands Gaussian Splatting support, file formats, and triangular splatting for photorealistic volumetric captures. Tooling improvements include the Node Particle Editor and Node Render Graph Editor for visual pipeline construction. Expect improved production workflows, lower memory footprints, and faster iteration cycles. Next steps: evaluate Clustered Lighting and the Frame Graph on representative scenes. Migrate heavy-light scenes incrementally and test performance across WebGPU and WebGL2. Review updated docs and demos for integration patterns and production pipeline recommendations.

Key points from the article:

  • Clustered lighting reduces per-pixel light cost for scenes with many lights.
  • Textured area lights enable image-based emission for physically accurate effects.
  • Node Particle Editor offers visual, non-destructive particle system authoring.
  • Frame Graph optimizes resource allocation and custom rendering pipelines.
  • Animation retargeting maps animations across different skeletons automatically.

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