DanceXR 2026.8 Release Notes

DanceXR 2026.8 is about getting out of your way while you work. Posing feels better everywhere — limbs that ease into place instead of snapping, joints that no longer bend the wrong way — and physics now sets itself up the moment you load a model, filling in what you used to select bone by bone. Hands hold on more reliably, a batch of material fixes puts the wet look and a number of surfaces back to how they should render, and alongside all of it a brand-new native path-traced app enters public preview.

What is New

Physics that sets itself up

Load a model and DanceXR now detects its hair, skirt, and soft-body bone chains for you, pre-filling the physics setup you previously had to select by hand.
Detection follows the same rules on every model, so results are consistent — and everything can still be adjusted manually.

Posing that feels right

Dragging a limb is now smoothed, so it eases into place instead of snapping when you flick the mouse.
Arms and legs no longer bend past their natural range. The limit now lives inside the pose solver itself, with an optional arm cone limit you can switch on.
Legs reach with the toes as well as the foot, so feet land more naturally at the end of a reach.
The move-and-rotate disc sits in a better place.

Better grasping

Hands hold on more reliably. A grip is kept until the hand clearly moves away, rather than flickering between two nearby objects.
Fingers can wrap around several shapes at once, and a grip follows the object if it moves.
Hands can now grasp props on the stage and other characters’ bodies, not only their own.

Materials and looks

A pass over the material system fixes a range of materials that were being classified incorrectly — glass, dithered, hair, floor, and path-traced variants now render as intended.
Missing material assets are reported instead of silently falling back to the wrong look.
The wet look is restored and improved, with a new water shader, a floor rain fix, and more natural rain distribution.
New light-beam shader.

Also New

DanceXR Native — public preview

A separate, standalone Windows application that renders characters with full path tracing on NVIDIA RTX hardware — real bounced light, soft shadows, and true reflections rather than real-time approximations.
Loads XPS models and VMD motions by drag and drop, with audio playback, camera motion, hair and soft-body physics, feet-on-floor correction, procedural idle motion, and a procedural room with volumetric fog and light shafts.
Desktop only — no VR — and requires Windows with a ray-tracing capable GPU. The free preview renders one character at a time. This is an early public preview, so expect rough edges, and please send feedback.

Improvements

Bug fixes

Fixed pelvis offset drift while posing.
Fixed pose visualization sizing.

In This Update at a Glance

Automatic hair, skirt, and soft-body physics setup on model load
Smoothed limb dragging and natural joint limits
Legs that reach with the toes, and a better-placed move-and-rotate disc
Grasping that holds on, spans multiple shapes, and reaches props and other characters
Restored wet look, new water and beam shaders, and material fixes
DanceXR Native path-traced viewer enters public preview

This release is about the parts of the workflow you shouldn’t have to think about — physics that configures itself, poses that land where you put them, and materials that look the way they were authored.