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Status & Roadmap

What Loom does today and what is planned next. This is the public, feature-level roadmap.

Loom is currently in preview (0.1.x, wire protocol v27). The full feature set below is implemented and continuously tested across both the Unity and Unreal consumers.

Shipped

Everything here works today, in both engines, and is covered by automated tests.

Live link

  • Direct binary Blender to engine streaming over loopback TCP. No relay, no disk, no FBX.
  • Per-edit deltas: full mesh only on topology change, positions-only for sculpt and animation, a 40-byte packet for a transform move.
  • Survives editor recompiles and disconnects. Reconnecting re-syncs the whole scene.
  • Runs while the editor is unfocused. Live edits stream into a running Play or PIE session.

Geometry and rigging

  • 9 Blender object types (mesh, curve, text, surface, metaball, armature, light, camera, empty).
  • All 1 to 8 UV channels, RGBA vertex colours, multi-material submeshes, 32-bit big meshes.
  • Armatures (bind poses and top-4 weights), relative shape keys to blendshapes (delta positions and normals).

Lights, cameras and world

  • 4 light types converted to physical units. Perspective and orthographic cameras with depth of field.
  • World ambient, Environment-Texture HDRI, and mist.

Instancing

  • Collection, geometry-node, particle and vert-face instances uploaded once and shared.
  • Linked-duplicate dedup, per-instance Object Info colour and random, dense-scatter GPU instancing.
  • Prefab-reference placement (a loom_prefab key instantiates your real engine prefab or Blueprint).

Materials and shaders

  • Principled BSDF to URP Lit or LoomLit UMaterial, including the advanced factors (transmission, subsurface, coat, sheen, specular IOR level, anisotropy).
  • Content-deduped textures packed into the engine’s map slots, HDR preserved.
  • 20+ shader nodes transpiled to real compiled shaders. Noise and Voronoi are ported from Blender’s own source, with all 19 Mix blend modes, a faithful Principled fallback, and an offline pre-flight diagnostics scan.
  • Pin-your-own-material overrides that survive every resync.

Game-ready authoring

  • Live colliders by name (UCX_, UBX_, USP_, UCP_, UMC_) and LOD groups (_LOD0..n).
  • Property routing (layer, tag, static flags, sorting layer).

Control and safety

  • Selective sync (collection or selection), freeze and pin, hand-edit protection, opt-in two-way edits.
  • Cross-app selection, undo-coherent resync, and a live throughput and queue HUD.

Preview to production

  • Bake a session to real assets: a Unity .prefab or an Unreal BP_LoomBake Blueprint over saved meshes, materials and textures, with lightmap UVs, LOD groups and colliders generated at bake.
  • Bake a frame range to a Unity AnimationClip or Unreal UAnimSequence.
  • Record and replay a session to a .loomcache file.
  • Headless .blend to asset bake with no editors open, for CI and build systems.

Two engines

  • One Blender producer drives a Unity consumer (C# / URP) and an Unreal consumer (C++ / UE Material) at parity. Both parse the same wire and the same golden fixtures.

Toward 1.0

  • Visual-polish pass. A hands-on review of the interactive look in both editors: procedural-texture fidelity, scatter shading, light intensity and temperature, transparency, Deferred and HDR, depth-of-field blur, and the baked look.
  • Release and packaging. Versioned builds for the Blender add-on, the Unity UPM package and the Unreal plugin, a distributable archive, a first-run sample scene, and marketplace listings.

Possible futures

Not committed. Candidates under consideration after 1.0.

  • Rigid body physics. Translate Blender’s Rigid Body settings into engine physics. Composes with the existing live-collider naming, which already builds the collision geometry.
  • Configurable target root or scene. Choose where synced objects land instead of the fixed Loom root.
  • LAN and multi-machine. Drive an engine on a second PC over the network. Today it is loopback only.
  • More shader nodes. Brick, Sky, IES, Bevel, Point Density, Wireframe, AO. These fall back cleanly today.