[NEW] Feature parity in Creator: full render features, export options and all integration plugins
FUNCTION GRAPH
[NEW] Any nodes can be discarded from computation.
[NEW] Images can be dropped into the graph. They are automatically converted as projected texture node.
[NEW] Images can be dropped on a graph node. If picked node is not an image node, images are automatically converted as projected texture node and connected to picked node input.
[NEW] Added auto convert data type while connecting nodes.
[NEW] Deleted connection when double clicking on connection start/end.
[NEW] Dropping handle connection in graph create a node.
[NEW] Improved node description and preview edition.
[NEW] Improved node preview in function editor widget panel.
[NEW] Node can be snapped on connection as soon as it has a free input and a free output.
[NEW] Contextual menu for adding a new node now has search capabilities (direct access to the search widget with tab).
[NEW] Nodes can be added directly by clicking on an input or output: in such case, the menu is filtered with compatible nodes.
[NEW] A connection can be replaced by a node by selecting it and clicking the search shortcut (tab).
[NEW] New panel "nodes used in graph" to easily select/highlight the different nodes currently in use.
[NEW] In search dialog, avoid confusion when several nodes have the same name (by adding the category name in brackets).
[NEW] Allowed searching for parameters in a node.
[NEW] Fixed empty entries in the "search node" field, typically with scenes created in an older version.
[NEW] Fixed search node's highlight sometimes remaining active whereas nothing is searched anymore.
[NEW] Added MetaNodes / components to the list of categories available for highlight (when the graph contains such nodes).
[NEW] When the last node of the currently highlighted category is deleted, make sure we totally reset highlights.
[NEW] Added the possibility to change the preview shape and scale on a per node basis, from the contextual menu.
[NEW] Fixed "nodes used in graph" panel initially empty when it has just been opened.
[NEW] [Search tools] improved look of search fields, by adjusting their background color depending on the current color scheme (important with light interface preset).
[NEW] [Search for parameters] fixed the position of widgets sometimes wrong when a group of widgets is made visible again after typing more letters.
[NEW] [Search for parameters] when the query matches the name of a group, keep all elements of the group visible (useful for when the user knows the name of the group but not the exact name of the parameter he is looking for).
[NEW] Fixed synchronization between the search dialog and the node selector when clicking on an input or an output of an existing node (hide not compatible nodes from the selector).
[NEW] In the search dialog (opened when adding a new node), keep the vertical scrollbar as long as the number of results necessitates it.
[NEW] Allow soloing a node for preview and ignoring its downstream (only for material graphs).
[NEW] Allow defining the material preview scale with a real unit instead of a +/- factor, as done elsewhere.
[NEW] Improved out of domain filter evaluation. It was not really defined (it was just what the interpolation polynom happened to be outside of the interpolated areas). Now we keep the same slope as the first / last point.
[NEW] Improved edition of filter: can edit the left most point that was not editable (and sometimes not in the right position). And the last point does not have to be in a fixed column.
[NEW] Improved edition of filter: added a display of the clipping mode and associated bounds (note they are not always editable, it depends of context).
[NEW] Allowed node resize from all sides and corners of the node header.
[NEW] Auto unfold nodes when resizing (they get back the state they had before minimization).
[NEW] The node name is displayed above the node when minimized or when its width is less than 2 grid units, the category icon is also shown.
[NEW] Semi unfolded state is now the default node display state (shows individual connections, but not unconnected slots).
[NEW] Stronger node fading effect.
[NEW] Nodes can be fully unfolded using a 3rd right click on the burger. (But it only unfolds tabs for vegetation nodes as they can have a lot of parameters).
[NEW] Fold and unfold the nodes using the "burger" icon on the right of the nodes. Left click to unfold by successive levels, double click to fully unfold, right click to fully fold.
[NEW] Added menu items to fade/delete non connected nodes in graph.
[NEW] Added menu items to fold/unfold all nodes in graph.
[NEW] Replaced legacy projection node (in category math | vector operations), which was difficult to use, by better defined "polar to x/y/z" and "x/y/z to polar" coordinate conversion nodes.
[NEW] Added new nodes "distance between points" and "angle between vectors".
[NEW] When dragging a disconnected node we can now drop it on a connection and the node will automatically connect in the middle of the connection if the types are compatible (conversion nodes will automatically appear to convert the datatype if possible). Addi
[NEW] Improved connection detection when dragging node. Now the connections will be detected in the entire surface of the node's header.
[NEW] Added possibility to move all connections on an output of a node, by holding down the shift key while clicking and dragging the output's handle. The connections can then be dragged all at once and connected to another output or they can be dropped on an e
[NEW] Added snapping to available output handles when moving several connections simultaneously.
[NEW] Added possibility to disable automatic node connection. The feature is disabled by default and is now enabled by holding down the ctrl key.
[NEW] New modulation setting for cloud specific inputs.
[NEW] Added a new display option to highlight disconnected nodes in the graph, made corrections to the logic of fade/hide/show.
[NEW] Added new versions of "rotation and twist" and "orientation rotation" vector math nodes, with connectable parameters, as well as additional "angle unit" and "rotation order" parameters.
[NEW] Added a choice of procedural shapes to the bounding volume node.
[NEW] Improved highlight of connections when dragging a node over them. We now use a more coherent highlight with a flashier color to help the user understand that the nodes can be dragged and dropped on the connections.
When extracting parameters from a node, the resulting node is now named with the input parameter name instead of using the default node name.
Fixed cyclick noises and cyclick fractals periodicity UI which prevented setting values larger than 32 (useful to make the fractal or noise periodic only along part of the axes, time included, by setting a very large period for the other axes).
Fixed fractal's detailing depth (aka octaves) used when there is a blender or combiner node upstream, especially visible with a ratio of 0 or 1. Other cases could negatively affect performance (too many octaves computed). Also fixes lack of fractal detail
Fixed render errors or artifacts when a graph evaluation leads to a null frequency being passed to some fractals.
Fixed potential crash while editing MetaNode.
Stopped removing disconnected nodes in materials graph when reloading a scene or asset.
Fixed underlying function not updating when modifying a graph in certain cases where we create an input connection on a node that had a preexisting input. For example dragging a connection handle on a node that already had an input or using the new drag a
Fixed connection loops when dragging multiple connections creating errors in cases where they should just cancel the action. Like connecting an input and an output of the same node.
Fixed highlights of connections not updating properly when switching node autoconnect on/off while the dragged node was on a connection.
Fixed hit area imprecision when too many objects were present in a small area (ie too many connections on a output handle).
Fixed wrong connection highlights when trying to autoconnect a node in an invalid slot.
Fixed object mode in cloud position options for cloud layers.
INTEGRATION AND EXPORT
[NEW] Added the compatibility with 3ds max and Maya 2023.
[NEW] Added the compatibility with Cinema 4D 2023.
[NEW] Added the compatibility with Cinema 4D s26 (windows and mac).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Added the support of Redshift in 3ds max.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / V-Ray] Added support for V-Ray 6 for 3ds max, Maya and Cinema 4D
[NEW] [Hybrid rendering] Added the compatibility with V-Ray 6 for 3ds max.
[NEW] [Hybrid rendering] Added the compatibility with V-Ray 6 for Maya.
[NEW] [Convert Tools] Added the ability to bake a map for the backlight of VUE materials.
[NEW] [Convert Tools] Added the ability to bake a map for the luminous intensity of VUE materials.
[NEW] [Convert Tools] EcoSystem instances can now be created with particle flow for the Redshift/V-Ray/art renderers.
[NEW] When the export is restricted to a zone, take the zone into account to restrict the visibility of EcoSystem instances at render time, when previewing export.
[NEW] Baked textures can now have anti-aliasing. This also applies to the convert tool in plugins.
[NEW] Improved baked texture precision using scale factor.
[NEW] PBR maps are now recognized when importing obj files. Materials that have them are automatically set to PBR. Roughness is supposed to be in a map_pr section. Metallic in a map_pm. Metallic/roughness can also be loaded from "refl/map_ns" if a matching file
[NEW] The texture anti-aliasing is now correctly applied to objects in EcoSystems with the "bake to texture maps" export mode.
[NEW] Exporting clouds in usd for omniverse. (With animation).
[NEW] Exporting clouds in usd/c4d support center on 0. (With animation).
[NEW] Omniverse synchronization for clouds.
[NEW] The baking of materials is now done with a precision adapted to the resolution chosen in the export dialog (previously it was a static value, meaning some functions could produce too blurry or too noised results). This also applies to the convert tool in
[NEW] Added a hint regarding legacy content compatibility key when a scene requires some copy-protected cornucopia3d content, and the located file fails to load.
[NEW] Improved the export of objects in EcoSystems with the "bake to texture maps" mode and when their materials use the "world/object standard" mapping (the baking now better approximate the actual aspect of the original object, but it can't be perfect since a
[NEW] Using an export zone now better works with terrains rotated around the z axis (previously the exported zone could be wrongly located. Rotations around x and y axes are still not supported. Also even if the position and size of the zone are now respected,
[NEW] Static clouds and Cloud layers can be exported as NanoVDB files.
[NEW] MetaClouds in cloud export zone are now exported (and not those only in object export zone).
[NEW] Improved message when scene file references an external asset which checksum has changed. In particular, detect the case of an e-on asset saved with a more recent version of VUE or PlantFactory.
[NEW] When dragging and dropping an alembic file containing cameras, or loading the file through python, always import the cameras as well (requires professional / enterprise).
[NEW] The back side of VUE/PlantFactory 2-sided materials is now converted for the Cinema 4D standard and physical renderers.
[NEW] The backlight of VUE/PlantFactory materials is now converted to arnold materials (useful for leaves).
[NEW] Fixed the installer so that it shows the VUE plugin for V-Ray 6 in 3ds max.
[NEW] The VUE plugin for V-Ray in 3ds max is now compiled with the sdk from V-Ray 5 update 2.3.
[NEW] VUE objects animated in 3ds max are now correctly rendered with V-Ray (previously they were rendered static).
[Convert Tools] Cleaned unused materials from the native scene after a conversion in Maya and Cinema 4D (previously it was only done when closing the VUE scene. 3Ds max already cleaned unused materials by itself).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of objects whose name contains characters not supported by Maya.
[Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the conversion of VUE mixed materials to Redshift materials (the distribution function wasn't taken into account).
[Convert Tools / RenderMan] Fixed a potential bug preventing the conversion to RenderMan materials (when the Maya lookdevkit plugin wasn't loaded).
[Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the conversion of some VUE materials (mixed or layered) to Redshift materials with the "bake to texture maps" mode (the Redshift material graph contained unneeded nodes).
[Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the conversion of VUE highlights for Redshift in Maya (with the "bake to texture maps" mode).
[Convert Tools] Fixed a freeze in Cinema 4D after converting an object whose 2-sided material was still used by a non-converted object in the scene.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the clearcoat color (the green component was copied in the blue one).
[Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed a possible crash when closing Cinema 4D after converting a VUE object to Redshift on windows (the c4d process kept running in the background).
Fixed normal mapping export of baked material.
Fixed issue with exported texture naming.
Fixed memory leak in c4d export.
Fixed potential inconsistencies in imported mesh when the option to replace pivot at the center of the object is activated.
Fixed a bug when exporting VUE materials containing several layers: the resulting single-layer material could have an incorrect scale and bump depth (it also applies to the export preview mode).
Avoided the baking of plant/rock variations that aren't instantiated in EcoSystems (it can reduce the export duration in some scenes with small populations).
Fixed the naming of exported VUE materials (mixed or layered) with the "bake to texture maps" (the name of the root material is now used instead of a sub material).
Fixed problems with the export preview mode: VUE primitives using procedural materials and that were manually baked, as well as non-baked VUE planes were not correctly rendered.
Fixed the export of procedural terrains whose material uses an "object standard" mapping (or a position input node with this mapping in the material graph). The generated texture maps could be very different from the original material depending on the ter
Fixed a potential crash or wrong export when using a zone on a procedural terrain (division by zero).
Fixed problems with the "export billboard" option: exporting individual objects holding EcoSystems produced billboards for instances without any texture; and exporting the entire scene produced no billboard at all.
Fixed potential error when exporting usd without geometry.
Fixed the export preview of ground/water planes, by taking the export zone into account.
Fixed the export of heightfield terrain when the scene has just been loaded and the terrain's altitudes were not read from the file.
Fixed huge slowness of alembic's entire scene import, when the file contains instances.
Fixed the conversion of VUE/PlantFactory materials using the mirror tiling mode (the generated native materials were not repeated).
Fixed warning and (non-blocking) error messages in Maya when converting VUE/PlantFactory materials to Redshift materials.
Partially fixed the display of Redshift 2-sided materials in Maya (they now appear with their color texture map, but still without alpha).
Fixed the ability to hide the 3ds max layer containing the VUE scene (EcoSystems reappeared after saving the 3ds max scene).
Avoided the addition of a new VUE shader node for V-Ray each time a scene was loaded in Maya (and also cleaned the nodes that were left in the scene when closing it).
Fixed the deletion of groups from the VUE World Browser, which could leave orphan groups in the 3ds max scene.
Fixed a crash in 3ds max that could happen with scenes containing EcoSystems.
Fixed a regression in Maya: some VUE objects like plants or meshes could have materials not correctly assigned (this affected both the display and the convert tool).
Fixed a possible freeze followed by a crash when closing the material editor (with mixed or volumetric materials).
Fixed a possible crash when closing Cinema 4D after saving a scene with VUE content.
Avoided the possible deletion of 3ds max objects after reopening a scene (if the scene contained a mesh whose parent was a 3ds max shape or editable spline).
Fixed potential inconsistencies in the visibility of instances in the host rendering, in case of complex material hierarchies.
Fixed missing refresh of the object properties panel when changing the selection from the World Browser.
Discarded color layer (was 100% black) when saving multipass as a multi-layered picture (.exr or .psd) in the context of plugins.
Avoid useless request on GPU memory in the RenderNode context: it could produce untimely errors in logs.
PYTHON
[NEW] Upgraded to python 3.11.
[NEW] Added 2 python functions to prompt a path from a script: promptfilepath and promptdirectorypath.
[NEW] Improved functions selectbymaterial, selectbymaterial and selectbypreviewcolor regarding groups: make it consistent with what the corresponding menu commands do, ie. Recurse in groups and select *all* children matching the criterion.
[NEW] Added functions gettexturemappathfortype, settexturemappathfortype in class eonmaterial (more convenient than the ones working by index).
[NEW] Handled displacement and normal mapping in functions manipulating texture maps in class eonmaterial.
[NEW] Added the possibility to export a terrain as a picture (heightmap) through python - type setexportoption("terrain_heightmap", true) before "exportobject").
Fixed multiple skinVUE issues.
Fixed crashes when capturing screenshots of OpenGL views on macOS (e-on python function "takescreenshot").
When modifying a material through python, invalidate it for interactive Path Tracer and usd synchro.
RENDERING
[NEW] Speed-up denoiser strength setting processing a bit with intel and AMD denoiser.
[NEW] Added a proper setting for srgb pictures. It should be used instead of gamma 2.2, which was only an approximation.
Made sure z-depth is always computed when we render an animation and explicitly check the channel in the animation options.
Fixed the saving of some multipass layers (object and material id) as 16-bit or 32-bit exr: they were 100% black.
Fixed support for absolute photometric ies profiles.
Fixed black tiles or stripes when using depth of field (except "fast hybrid 2.5d") or camera blur.
Work around crash of HyperVUE on macOS11 "bigsur" only: the module goz (zbrush import) will not be loaded by HyperVUE on this platform. VUE and the network rerenderers are not affected. Note that upgrading to macOS12 "monterey" fixes the problem.
Fixed memory misuse and leak when using some npr options.
Warn the user if the memory needed to render a displaced water surface (or an infinite procedural terrain) would exceed the available resources (in such cases, decreasing the water/terrain quality will be needed).
PATH TRACER
[NEW] More accurate tone mapping functions for the interactive Path Tracer (especially for low intensities).
[NEW] Added to the standalone renderer a command line option to override sample count per pixel set up in a scene file to be rendered with the Path Tracer.
[NEW] Reduced the memory footprint of procedural terrains and speed up their preparation for the Path Tracer.
Fixed relighting and multipass options not available when "optimize last render pass" is checked in user settings.
Disabled GPU antialiasing and deterministic indirect lighting options when switching to the Path Tracer, as they are irrelevant (tooltips now explain that).
Hidden denoising modes which are not supported on current platform/architecture, instead of displaying a confusing error message.
Fixed a potential crash when aborting the render very soon.
Do not save output pictures when the Path Tracer render is aborted.
Fixed diverging lighting when mapping bright environment maps onto objects, and potential mismatch between mapped geometry and sky when light balance is set to full ambient (image based lighting setup).
Fixed wrong tone mapping for the interactive Path Tracer, and added support for camera post processing gamma tweak.
Fixed EcoSystem instances potentially hidden from render in animated scenes, due to motion blur feature (not relevant for path-tracing) not correctly deactivated.
Fixed PlantFactory EcoSystem instances randomly changing their positions in the interactive Path Tracer, when the render scene preview is running. Only occurred with "procedural" specimen quality.
Added a warning when the EcoSystem population is incompatible with Path Tracer (due to optimized mode for ultra small instances).
NETWORK RENDERING
Fixed frames not saved at the location chosen by the user, when rendering an animation with HyperVUE or standalone renderer, if the scene has never been saved.
ANIMATION
Fixed potential crashes when manipulating key-frames in the timeline.
Fixed dialog asking the user if they want to animate the camera even though they didn't change any post processing options.
MATERIAL
[NEW] Added new PBR ggx highlight model for generic materials (keep old model by default internally).
[NEW] [SUBSTANCE] Added support of clearcoat index of refraction.
[NEW] Added an option to invert bump on back impacts, which can produce more realistic results with leaves, typically.
[NEW] Made the "natural grain" color channel mode randomizable (and thus the default material as well).
[NEW] Added "quality boost" option to displaced water surface objects to work around huge memory usage when rendering at high resolutions.
[NEW] Improved material displacement on PlantFactory plant (improved quality, added support of uniform subdivision).
Fixed material editor losing the presence settings on mixed materials used as layers.
Fixed material name labels and render status buttons not properly updated when reordering layers in the material editor.
Fixed graph UI (specifically, the vector seed values) not updated when randomizing a material from the material editor button.
Fixed a crash when enabling a PBR channel in the basic material editor.
Fixed a bug in the basic editor of PBR materials which removed the clearcoat normal map (accessible in the advanced editor).
DISPLACEMENT
[NEW] Improved displacement: new option to apply "post bump" (bump based on displacement function). "Affect material distribution" option is taken into account for bump and normal computation.
[NEW] Improved additional bump in the case of the plane primitive.
[NEW] Improved displacement for the torus primitive.
In the scene preview, avoid recomputing groups containing displaced objects if no change has occurred.
ECOSYSTEM
[NEW] Add option to limit the memory dedicated to the extraction of instances as unique objects near the camera when in theory each instance should be unique because of position-dependent modifiers like wind/ventilators, world-based displacement mapping, etc.
Fixed a crash when changing the quality of a plant in an EcoSystem projected from a spline on several objects.
Fixed potential render issues when changing the quality of a PlantFactory species in an EcoSystem.
Fixed difficulty typing the full quality radius with more than 1 digit.
Fixed potential crashes when painting with a custom eco-brush having more than one specimen.
Fixed duplication of EcoSystem materials, for PlantFactory species used with "static mesh" quality mode, if the selected species was already used as EcoSystem in another scene, and thus cached to disk.
Fixed inconsistent results (instances disappearing from render, missing ventilator influence...) When a same EcoSystem is influenced by several effects requiring the extraction of close instances.
Fixed broken animation of instances if auto-keyframing is disabled during the creation of the (animated) specimen (from a .vob file or an object copied from current scene).
Fixed inconsistent behavior when activating the flat coloring mode on an EcoSystem layer: the variable density, if any, was totally ignored, and evaluated as zero everywhere.
Fixed inconsistent EcoSystem visibility status in the scene preview, when switching from visible / hidden / flat coloring (instances remaining hidden whereas they should not, typically).
Fixed lost flat coloring option for EcoSystem layers upon reloading of a scene.
Fixed potential artefacts when rendering an EcoSystem using dynamic population over an infinite terrain.
Fixed the 'hide from render' icon not working in the EcoSystem painter (for global EcoSystems).
Fixed the auto-save and fast-save (.fsVUE format) of ultra large EcoSystem populations (more than 20 million instances).
Fixed fatal error on invalid specimen index read for EcoSystem instance, now error is non-fatal and default index is used.
ATMOSHPERE
[NEW] Inverted cloud layer setting.
Fixed slight discrepancy between self shadowing of MetaClouds and cloud layers.
TERRAIN
[NEW] New "topographic wetness index" node (= measure of the drained area), for heightfield altitude graphs only. The node allows to identify the areas of a terrain where the most rain flows and/or accumulates. The result is similar to some of the erosion secon
[NEW] Allow dropping several heightmap files together into a viewport (for import as terrains).
[NEW] Improved reactivity of the circular progress hint showing in the heightfield terrain editor's 3d display.
[NEW] Substantial speed-up of the data preparation phase for the 3d display of the terrain editor, improving responsiveness to changes (700ms gained for a 2k terrain).
[NEW] Reduced memory footprint and render preparation time for heightfield terrains using normal mapping and no displacement mapping.
Fixed flattened terrain when doing "reset all 2d/3d sculpting" on a heightfield terrain which has 3d sculpting but no user touch-up node.
Fixed spline material effect sometimes not applying after sculpting or smooth remap, for example on a terrain created after the spline effect was already configured.
Fixed wrong brush radius (depending on terrain resolution) in the heightfields terrain editor.
Fixed heightfield terrain update issues with some graph topologies (especially involving multiple connections to shared nodes' outputs).
Fix vocabulary inconsistencies among brush panel, brush editor, and trigger names in the options|operations tab ("radius" / "brush radius" / "brush size").
Fix erosion preset button behavior (on left-click) which contradicted the tooltip hint.
Fix current brush changing its brushing mode behind one's back when toggling force2d.
Prevented heightfield 3d sculpting deltas from being rescaled vertically when changing the terrain resolution.
Fixed a potential crash with a procedural terrain, when selecting it in the views after several renders.
SPLINE
[NEW] Improve handling of all kinds of composite objects (groups, csg, metaballs etc.) By the material or EcoSystem projection effect, with some limitations for EcoSystem population (nested object's ratio not accounted for, except for simple groups, and populat
When using EcoSystem or material effects and checking "only selected objects", fix incorrect EcoSystem population of text letters (except the first of each kind) and problems storing influence ratio percentage for them.
Fix overlap between influenced object/EcoSystem name and "action" column in the spline editor's material effect tab.
Do not create spline control points onto hidden objects.
Fixed possible crashes when using spline tools (population, proximity node, etc.).
Fixed handling of effects when the spline is inside a group.
Fixed the visibility status of splines not considered when projecting their material (except possible EcoSystem layers) onto other objects.
Fixed per-object spline material influences on displaced objects.
Fixed spline material effects totally ignoring displacement when the objects under the spline are displaced.
PERFORMANCE
[NEW] Improved the speed of decimation algorithm for large meshes originated from PlantFactory vegetations (its slowness made it totally unusable).
[NEW] Improved speed of file scanning for the browser.
Fixed possible duplication of images in memory when loading several times the same image for different use cases.
STABILITY
Fixed crash of Path Tracer at the end of rendering.
Fixed crashes when using the stereoscopic render mode.
Fixed a potential crash when trying to replace a node in the function editor, when the operation necessitates to break existing connections and the user agrees to it.
Fix rare crash when adding a new EcoSystem specimen in a population.
Fixed rare crashes when rendering SolidGrowth plants.
Fixed a potential crash when applying loop (turbo smooth) subdivision to a mesh originated from a PlantFactory vegetation.
Fixed potential crashes when moving the camera or objects holding EcoSystem instances, when the EcoSystem uses dynamic population and the render scene preview is running.
Fixed a potential crash when painting instances on a hyperblob, using the EcoSystem painter.
Fixed a potential crash in the timeline after destroying the animation of the selected object.
Fixed a potential crash when moving a MetaCloud, when a camera uses the option "lock height above ground".
Fixed a potential crash in the terrain editor, when modifying the graph quickly and multiple times (typically when changing a parameter through an up-down edit control, by clicking one of its arrows and using mouse dragging).
UI/UX
[NEW] Materials with identical names are automatically renamed with a |n tag. That avoids ending up with a lot of material that have the same exact name because of automatic material duplication on edit.
[NEW] The main window title bar now displays the absolute file path of the current scene instead of only the base name.
[NEW] Improved reflection map edition.
[NEW] Added support of mathematical operation in edit field.
[NEW] Added support of mathematical operation in edit field with units.
[NEW] Changed the look of node selector panel in function editor.
[NEW] In the object aspect panel's contextual menu, "edit all materials" now uses the "current" material in the selection as a basis for edition.
[NEW] Accept undo redo keyboard shortcuts in function graph editors.
Fixed overlapping letters when creating 3d text on macOS using a hidpi (aka. Retina) monitor.
Fixed escape and suppr behavior in the 2d filter editor (escape key will cancel edition, suppr key will remove the selected points).
Editable combox now enter edit mode when clicked (instead of showing the list first and needing a second click, list opens with the button). Non editable combo box are unaffected.
Graph background grid colors can be set from the general color settings.
Better visibility of menu items with state (on windows).
Fixed hi-dpi cursors that were too small.
Added a warning when texture files could be too long for your OS.
Fixed problems in the rare case when a message box needs to be displayed before the main window has even shown up (during the splashscreen for example).
Fixed image name not copiable in the "locate missing picture" open panel.
Fixed the "picture save" file chooser panel not modal when launched from the pop-up menu of the render stack.
Fixed glitches in material line.
Improved numerical precision when using internal unit different from display unit.
Fixed filter editor closing while editing filter parameter.
When dragging and dropping a file in the application, select the newly loaded object, if any.
Fixed potential artifacts in the zoomed material preview, depending on the window size.
When a render to active view is stacked, automatically select it the next time the user opens the render stack.
Make sure message boxes are always on top (avoid them being hidden behind the render display dialog, typically).
Fixed a potential issue when a scene requires another file, and the one located by the user does not match the expected asset: in some cases, the file browser would pop up again and again without explanation.
Fixed potential artefacts after hovering the category menubox in the function editor.
Fixed inconsistencies in the selection of channels in the g-buffer render options: it was taken into account by the render engine, but did not stay when re-opening the dialog (requires professional or enterprise).
Fixed unwanted closure of the function editor when typing enter key in an edit field (such as the ones used to edit the selected node's title).
Fixed wrong position of the some button background when they are highlighted (browser search / clear search button, for instance).
Fixed bad colors in fixed pipeline mode.
Fixed a potential slowness of the UI with large scenes due to the update of the hidden links tab (for images and imported objects). As long as the links tab isn't shown, the UI is now more responsive after some actions like loading scenes/atmospheres and
EcoSystems projected from splines can now be exported (or converted from integration plugins) by only selecting the objects receiving the instances (previously it only worked if the splines were selected which could be disturbing).
Fixed a regression on mac preventing to enter values in numerical inputs for the position/scale/rotation of an object.
Fixed browser previews of images sometimes not updating. (In case of new files).
Cloud layer profile filter no longer allows below zero values on y axis.
Fixed potential color overflow on menu separator. .
Fixed some assets (pictures and animations) missing from the "World Browser - links" (aka "images") tab, or that would not be linked to their referencing object when selecting the asset line or the object line in the corresponding World Browser tabs.
In the terrain and EcoPainter brush editors, fixed inversion of the picture loaded as brush mask.
Dual-ended sliders now show a different mouse cursor when dragging the whole range vs. Dragging a single boundary.
Minor timeline navigation improvements, especially when using a 3dconnexion space mouse or mouse sharing software.
Reduce options panel height to better fit on smaller laptop monitors.
Fixed misplaced bounding box when using old gizmos on a hidpi monitor on macOS.
Shown text hints in the status bar when hovering/operating gizmos.
Fixed multi-selection with shift+arrow keys in list boxes.
No longer lose the known auto-exposure (used in scene previews and 3d viewports) when opening the options, hiding/displaying the scene preview, or doing 'purge memory'.
Fixed viewport display of object groups used as EcoSystem specimen, when using the "master object edition" option from the "World Browser - library" tab.
Fixed "snapping grid position" and "sea level altitude" options improperly converted when changing the scene's internal unit in the options panel.
Scene navigation: fixed orbiting around selected punctual objects, like lights, fans, etc.
Fixed the 3d viewport's "scale helper" (ruler) text using a tiny and aliased font on magnified monitors.
Fixed possible issues when selecting in real-time viewports "dimensionless" objects like lights, cameras and fans.
Remove animation formats from the list of available file formats when importing models (picture formats are present though, because images can be imported as terrain heightmaps, whereas it does not work for animations).
Fixed glitch in object export options dialog.
Fixed a missing reset of the shared material layers when creating a new project (could lead to inconsistencies).
Fixed inconsistent behavior when a shared layer is used inside a mixed material: it was not updated when the shared layer is modified.
Fixed wrong range of altitude influence slider in layered material editor: way too huge when the scene contains one or several global EcoSystems.
When selecting a global EcoSystem, do not show any material in the object properties.
Disable the "bake displacement mapping" checkbox when baking an hyperblob: in this case, the displacement can only be baked in a second pass.
DISPLAY
[NEW] Maximum texture resolution used in the real-time (OpenGL) viewports is now configurable, with a default of 1024 like former versions of VUE.
Fixed random textures displayed on camera backdrops when opening the backdrop dialog.
Fixed backdrop displayed as all black in the preview when a scene that contained a camera with a backdrop was loaded.
MISC
[NEW] New platform-independent crash reporting tool.
[NEW] Improved the handling of processor affinity on windows platform (take the affinity into account to adapt the number of rendering threads, typically).
[NEW] Improved the baking of boolean operations to polygons when the objects' geometries do not intersect, by preserving UVs, if any (can be useful to crop a sub-part of a complex mesh).
[macOS] Fixed untimely error messages when launching the application with a command line on mac.
No longer lock the scene's internal unit and spherical options in the application options panel when the scene contains geographical objects like terrains imported from geographical formats or from the RealWorld terrain import dialog.
INSTALLATION
[NEW] [Plugins] new installation mode for Maya, no longer installing anything in Maya's directories.
Fixed setup processes running forever in background when the user refuses to grant admin rights.
In silent installation mode, if the -lang option is not supplied, select English as language instead of failing.
[NEW] Improved the responsiveness of the graph display, added more configurable colors for customization, fixed the display of connection lines that where too thick when zooming out, added a more visible highlight of connections (middle part and ends), made item selection more precise, added highlight on all node lines as we can act on them, added a shift of parameter labels to better show the tab/group/parameter tree structure, added a small motion threshold before moving a node.
[NEW] More visible selection and highlight when graph is zoomed out.
[NEW] Snap to handles when creating a connection.
[NEW] Added a right click contextual menu on graph connections (move to source node / move to destination node / delete connection). Move to source/destination selects and centers that node in the graph view.
[NEW] When creating or moving graph connections, or moving nodes, or selecting by area, the graph will scroll automatically if you move the mouse near the graph border while dragging the connection. The speed increases with mouse position, and scroll direction is relative the center of graph view.
[NEW] Disabled connections are now drawn as dashed lines instead of being invisible. They exist when a connection was created to something that is optional in a node and is currently disabled.
[NEW] Added a specific action in the graph menu to align all nodes, distinct from the alignment option. Option affects future manipulations; action is performed once when clicked.
[NEW] Added overlap indications in the graph: overlapping nodes will have a red "!" icon on top.
[NEW] Added "Vector 2 to Vector 3" and "Vector 3 to Vector 2" conversion nodes to facilitate UV usage in a graph.
[NEW] Added "Arc tangent of (X, Y)" math node (a.k.a. "atan2"), as well as Hyperbolic trigonometric functions and their inverse.
[NEW] Many Math nodes now accept any input type (number, vector 2, vector3, color): the operation is applied on each component separately. For nodes that take two inputs, the second input can either be a number used as parameter for each input component (e.g. pow(input1.x, input2), pow(input1.y, input2) etc.), or a vector of same size as the input, where each component is used as parameter for operating on the corresponding component of the input node (e.g. pow(input1.x, input2.x), pow(input1.y, input2.y), etc.). Vector nodes "Length", "Normalize" and "Dot product" now also accept Vector 2 as input, not only Vector 3.
[NEW] Added edition of parameter layout directly in the material editor published parameter tab.
[NEW] Added edition of parameter layout directly in the MetaNode parameter list.
[NEW] Added position mode option in UV node.
[NEW] Added a node pulling a MetaBall's or HyperBlob's (or a single primitive's) distance field into the graph, in order to delimit a volume in space, typically to define a standalone cloud shape inside a cloud layer. The node's output is a sort of distance to the object but inverted so that positive values define the "inside" space, and negative values the "outside" space.
[NEW] Implement a Smoothing parameter on the "Closest Neighbor" and "1st - 2nd neighbor" variants of the Voronoi noises.
[NEW] Made the "Division" math node vector-compatible as well (other Math nodes had been made vector-compatible earlier on).
[NEW] Added a second output to the "Division" node to get the remainder of the division and add a standalone "Remainder" node.
[NEW] The "Threshold" node (Filter category) now has an option to choose between the Low and the High value when the input is strictly equal to the Threshold (formerly, the High value was silently assigned).
[NEW] Function preview is taking into account scene time.
Fixed graph tooltip that was not always displayed for connections.
Better event handling, the thing you pick on button press is the thing that is used to perform the action (and not the one that is under the mouse after moving a bit).
Click and drag now keeps the mouse capture until release, so that you can move the mouse outside the graph without interrupting the current action).
Edit on node of label or data now happens only on second click on the node, not right away when you select it.
Added a small tolerance before moving a selected node.
Remember the previous position in the graph view when changing of edited graph (when editing a MetaNode for instance).
Better text drawing when graph is de-zoomed. Text is now rasterized at current display size instead of being scaled down.
Added a new option in main graph menu to display a grid in background of the graphs.
Fixed lost mouse capture when dragging the graph view, when the mouse was moved outside of the graph area.
Graph nodes can be freely resized. Minimization happens when node width is set below 1/2 the minimal width. When minimized, the node size is controlled by the vertical component of the resize.
Updated the placement of nodes that are generated by the application.
Fixed broken display of colormaps in graph nodes.
When node height is large, we can better use the space by placing the preview above the label, instead of left. That allows a better preview of material graphs, by resizing the nodes to your convenience. The maximum preview size for textures is currently limited thought.
Added an option to enable/disable the minimap in the graph view.
Added in node preview of 2D filters.
Parent parameter node has been renamed to "Ancestor parameter".
Better placement of input/output nodes inside newly created MetaNodes: the right place is next to the node that uses the input/output.
Removed the useless "Display nodes minimized" option, which prevented a lot of interactions in the graph. Nodes can still be minimized by selecting them, and using the right click menu, or by resizing them.
Better "show preview" options: each node has a Hide/Show/Auto setting. Hide/show overrides the global setting (for nodes that can have previews).
Fixed display of Help of Graph Nodes.
Vector composers, decomposers, 2D/3D converters, and axis permutations are now grouped in the "Vector Composition" subcategory inside the "Math" category of nodes.
Fixed a bug in the "XYZ Product (Separate Parameters)" node that led fractals downstream in the graph to evaluate too few or too many "octaves" (= fractal detail).
Fixed "Turbulence damping" parameter of the "Three Noises" fractal being ignored by mistake (since 2011!).
Fixed inconsistency when switching noise of fractal node. Internal noise scale was changed.
Fixed potential incorrect graph evaluation when containing MetaNode.
Avoided useless invalidation when opening/closing MetaNode function editor.
Select the appropriate output in the graph, when opening it from the different tabs of the Material Editor. .
Disabled contract/ungroup MetaNode icons if the corresponding action is not possible due to current selection.
Fixed copy-pasting a function, material, etc. containing a "Spline Proximity" node, where the copy lost track of which scene Spline to use (when not configured with an internal spline).
Fixed "Spline Proximity" node "Distance" and "2D Distance" outputs when used on the material of an Infinite object (Sea plane, Ground plane, or Infinite Procedural Terrain): the output values were excessively small as to be almost unusable.
RENDERING
[NEW] Render thumbnails are now computed for current screen dpi instead of default resolution.
[NEW] Speed-up rendering (up to 10%, especially with atmosphere rendering).
[NEW] Optimization of up to 20% when rendering clouds.
[NEW] New altitude inputs for clouds.
[NEW] Cloud specific input now supports local, object, world, or legacy coordinates.
[NEW] New position option node for clouds (support local, object, world, or legacy coordinates).
[NEW] Improve soft shadows projected on clouds.
[NEW] When auto-exposure is estimated from a progressive preview render (either Scene Preview, or regular render in "Preview" quality), a first estimation is now computed and applied as soon as the coarsest pass of the render ends, so that both the render and the 3D viewports become readable sooner, in case the exposure gap is large (e.g., when switching atmosphere model). The final auto-exposure estimation is done at the end of render as usual (the difference with the initial estimation is usually quite small).
Reduced the frequency of PathTracer render display during rendering (mainly useful because denoising can be long, reducing the number of denoising process saves time).
Fixed a bug when denoiser were not applied on render with very low sample per pixel.
Fixed artefacts when rendering glow on some materials (animated, non-volumetric).
Fixed the use of the Delete key to delete renders in the Render Stack which led to losing the focus (then subsequent Delete strokes would actually delete objects in the World Browser, for example).
Fixed rendering when some layers of a material layers stack have their "Visibility" icon set to "invisible" or "solid color": many effects were still applied when invisible (bump, displacement or normal mapping, luminous setting, color transmitted/reflected) or when set to "solid color" (Ambient occlusion, Highlights, PBR Metalness, Normal mapping, etc.).
Avoid re-enabling the render stack thumbnails too soon, which could introduce inconsistencies when a message box was displayed at the end of a render.
Fixed the saving of Multi-Pass as multi-layer PSD, when a 16-bit precision is requested.
Fixed the frame number indicated in the information strip, when rendering a single frame of an animation.
Fixed a regression with the linear exposure filter which was only applied to a third of the image.
Fixed a bug with quick renders in OpenGL views: they were deleted when the render preview ended (above the camera controls), or when the spline editor is opened.
Reduced the render time of objects using many materials (a test in a simple scene showed a time divided by 1.6 with 125 materials, 3.2 with 500 materials, 12.8 with 2000 materials. The gain is probably smaller in scenes using costly render effects.).
Fixed bad Altitude influence calculation when using Mixed Material and Layered Materials with "Absolute" and "Relative to Sea" modes for Altitude influence, when the Material layer itself uses non-World coordinate mapping.
Fixed arbitrary "Smooth blending strip" width for Mixed Materials using Absolute or Relative-to-sea modes: formerly the strip width depended on the Transition altitude, which could be zero, leading to a brutal change of material at the boundary even with maximum Smoothness. Now uses the same blending method as the "per-material" mode as a work-around. A better fix would be to offer an additional transition width parameter in these modes, to be able to set a truly Absolute value.
Fixed HyperBlob's underlying material scale ignored when rendering.
Auto-exposure is not reset anymore when rendering is aborted (previous estimation is kept).
Objects hidden from render should not collide with particles (including rain/snow collision).
Slightly increase lens glare resolution in preview mode and for final renders.
Fixed shadows of vegetation primitives with two-sided material.
MISC.
[NEW] Fixed a crash when loading color settings.
[NEW] VUE, PlantFactory and PlantCatalog Exporter will now be able to report the usage of their features. This will help e-on software to focus on the most relevant ones. This option can be enabled/disabled in File -> Options... -> General Preferences -> Send feature usage data.
Drop support for MacOS 10.10 "Yosemite".
Fixed progress bar never updated when saving a material on Mac OS.
Fixed a potential memory leak in file decompression and improved the reading speed of large scenes.
Fixed a case where the application offered to locate missing images several times despite the user saying "No to all".
Improved the compatibility with scenes containing copy-protected content which is not owned by the user: instead of refusing to load the scene, just ignore the missing functions/material layers and display the list of issues at the end of the loading.
Fixed a crash when computing fast OpenGL preview on HiDPI screen.
Removed obsolete OpenGL auto-configuration feature (all GFX support the Shader engine).
Fixed bad amount of VRAM detected for M1 macs (ARM-based).
Fixed Apple M1 "fixed pipeline" hardware renderer being detected as a software OpenGL implementation.
Skipped useless hardware requirements check on Apple M1 which could lead to invalid messages.
Optimize a border case where a group used as single operand of a Boolean (therefore a no-op) would still be baked as a Union (required when used as operand of an actual Boolean operation).
[Documentation] Reorganized Spline Editor section, especially the general description at the beginning (now split between general presentation and subsections "Creation and Edition" and "Additional Spline Tools"). The Spline creation and edition workflow is now presented in a more structured and detailed manner (with hints and shortcuts). The "Terrain Effect" subsection was also improved, with a detailed explanation of the "Amplitude" setting and descriptive examples.
[Documentation] Substantial rephrasing and clarification in the "Material Editor/Mixed Materials" section, especially in "Influence of Altitude".
Try to detect the installed version of V-Ray to pre-fill the version we install (only available on Windows).
Modified installers and updaters to be compatible with Mac OS 12 Monterey.
UI/UX
[NEW] Added long due --help option to the command line interface.
[NEW] Added drag n drop of scene file in Startup panel.
[NEW] Improved error message when export failed.
[NEW] Hooking Point editor is now resizable.
[NEW] In material editor, switch back to previous mode if no picture selected while switching to mapped picture.
[NEW] Rework of ambient light in OpenGL preview that was nearly always black (shader engine only). Now it is a fraction of the overall lights in scene.
[NEW] Fixed French overflowing text in volumetric material editor.
[NEW] Support mouse wheeling to zoom in/out over the Animation Timeline and Animation Properties bars.
[NEW] Allowed ungrouping MetaClouds, useful to reuse a list of spheres generated using the "Convert to MetaCloud" feature, for example. It is now also possible to convert a MetaCloud directly into a MetaBall or a HyperBlob.
[NEW] Added an icon to directly edit the Multi-pass format options from the MultiPass dialog.
[NEW] Added the possibility to override the specimen colors in the viewport, to easily highlight a given population.
Faster scan of files for faster opening of the internal file selection dialogs.
Allow using a complete drive in browser as tab.
Really disconnect constants when using the "Disconnect parameter" in material editor.
Do not remove "unused" graph nodes when using the "Disconnect parameter" in material editor, that still can be useful later on.
Made the image path display in image properties non editable, because sometimes it is not a path but some description (of a generated image), that was confusing to be able to change it and have the application try to load it. .
In "3D filter" editor and "Section profile" editor, do not replace current filter with original filter when we cancel a "Load", that's not a cancel of the current edit.
Fixed a dead lock in the browser (which occurred at least when multi selecting elements).
Asynchronous previews in browser, no need to wait a long time to change folder while previews are computed, they finish in background.
Fixed invisible icons of user defined categories in browsers, can only fix new categories, previously added one need a manual correction (set the icon using the right clic menu on the tabs that have no visible icon).
Correct ill-defined tangent effect in 3D filters: For a given set of points and tangents, we did not obtain the same curve depending on where the points were inserted before being moved. That was also producing asymmetric curves around points, even though the displayed tangent looked symmetric. .
Corrected filter 3D editor to use actual Bezier control points instead of tangents with a varying intensity that depended on the insertion point.
Better cut in the 2D and 3D filter editors, inserting points keep the exact same curve.
Fixed incorrect point highlight in 3D filter editor.
Reset point coordinates on open in the 1D filter editor.
Introduced a --interface_scaling followed by a factor in command line argument to run application in different HiDPi mode. Example: --interface_scaling 2.0 will double the size of every piece of interface.
Change the way edit controls with length react to arrows and page up. Arrow up will now add one of the displayed unit.
Fixed native browser not having quick access on windows.
Minor panel redraw performance improvement (skip obsolete code handling now absent dialog background gradation).
Fixed conflicts between configured shortcuts and edit fields: for example, if you had configured '=' for some action, you could no longer use it in an edit field without also triggering the configured action (except for alphanumerical characters). As a side-effect, on macOS this fixes the fact that Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown keys were inoperant in numerical edit fields (whereas they now properly increment/decrement the value by some fixed amount depending on each edit field).
On macOS, Cmd+Arrow key now has the expected behavior in edit fields, i.e. move/select to the beginning/end of line. The former custom trigger of Alt+Arrow key has been kept for compatibility (edit fields do not support moving/selecting word by word, like Alt+Arrow key should in theory do).
Speed-up loading of the material summary (with hundreds of materials) and display a progression after a few seconds.
Ignored LOD computation in Object preview renderer.
Fixed material name and scale when loading a material to replace a layer.
Fixed Clamping mode not available in Filter editor.
Fixed message boxes not taking into account the modal dialog potentially running (Windows only).
Fixed the behavior of checkboxes in the render information strip options (were displayed as partially selected, and 2 clicks were needed to select an entry).
When adding a new material layer to an existing material, reuse the parent material's mapping mode.
Fixed the position of message boxes generated from the render stack, in multi-screen context.
Fixed wrong cropping of some panels depending on the screen size (options panel on a laptop, typically).
Fixed missing refresh of published parameters tab in EcoSystem, Mixed and Volumetric Material Editors.
Fixed inconsistencies in the Recent Files menu when some of the recent files are no longer accessible.
Avoided the automatic closing of the File Format Options dialog when one clicks outside of it (except when it is opened from the native file browser - in this case, it is mandatory to do so).
Fixed the OpenGL preview being too dark when "Light from scene" viewport option is disabled.
Fixed imprecisions when zooming/dezooming in the render display (now better centered on the cursor position). If using the + and - buttons, the focus is the kept on the current center of the image, instead of the top-left corner.
Closing the render display now closes the NPR Options.
Fixed a regression in the render display: the icons to show the alpha/depth and npr layers could be enabled whereas the layers were not available.
Fixed the black strips that could appear in the render display when zooming/scrolling during the render process.
In the transparency tab of the material editor, the dispersion checkbox is now disabled with the dispersion slider when necessary (to enable it, caustics have to be enabled both in the global render options and in the material render options). This behavior is more consistent with other parts of the editor.
Fixed the scale value displayed in the hypertexture tab of the volumetric material editor.
Reduced latencies when transforming objects with gizmos in scenes with many materials.
Undo/redo operations can now be totally disabled in the Preferences by setting the "maximum number of operations [...]" to 0. This enables making the UI more responsive in heavy scenes.
Fixed the saving of titles for the thumbnails of renders in the stack.
Fixed the application of the Post Render Options to quick renders done in views that are not associated to an actual camera of the scene (top/front/side and perspective views).
Fixed the state of the "Edit Alpha" button in the EcoSystem material editor, so that it always appears as "toggled" when an alpha function is connected.
Avoided the useless horizontal scroll bar that appeared in the population list of EcoSystems.
Fixed "quick render" feature in views using a camera of the scene different from the currently active one (which was always used).
Made the display of meshes with multiple materials more efficient when they have a user-defined preview color (in the "Object - Aspect" dialog in the top right corner of the main VUE window).
Added an icon button (+) on the thumbnail of plants in the EcoSystem material editor, to make the "add preset" feature more visible (it replaces the pop-up menu that appeared when clicking on the thumbnail).
The lines of items in the EcoSystem material editor and in the lens flare editor can now be selected by clicking on their thumbnails.
Fixed the application of the preview colors (defined in the Object Aspect tab) when grouping objects, creating Boolean objects, and splitting meshes (by material). It now takes the "Use auto color whenever possible" preference and the preview colors of objects into account. This is particularly useful in heavy scenes where preview colors are enabled to make the display faster.
Reduced the opening time of the browser for plants presets in the EcoSystem material editor or in the EcoSystem painter (for a plant with 50 presets, it now opens in 0.5s instead of 2.5s).
Improved the "Paint" tab of the Terrain Editor to use all the available space.
Improved the Material list UI at bottom of "Paint" tab.
Removed useless "Equalize" button in Terrain Editor.
Fixed potential crash on add cloud primitive on old MetaClouds.
Fixed MetaNode collection in function editor node list appearing outside of "User MetaNode" category.
Fixed flickering object graph when moving object.
Fixed refresh issue on cancel in function editor.
Fixed sometimes losing focus of the application at the end of a render (causing another application to flash on the top of VUE).
Fixed a crash on mac when rendering with OpenGL preset in main view. .
Fixed some empty browser when selecting specimens for an EcoSystem.
Fixed issue with plant browser sometimes having a wrong layout.
Removed some specific nodes (cloud/particles) on terrain graph menu.
Fixed water surface options synchronization with function editor.
Fixed ghost editor popping when clicking on color control.
Fixed Function Graph node types reappearing when switching between procedural and heightfield terrains.
Fixed previous version menu sometimes not working.
Fixed some case where editors do not respond to click anymore. .
Prevent some rare crash when closing material editor.
Removed some unnecessary scrollbars it published parameters tab in material editor. .
Add button in the Terrain Editor to edit the altitude graph more easily.
Major display optimization when merely moving any window except the main window (i.e., floating windows).
Minor display optimization for large windows on macOS (mostly 4K/5K, Scaled Display).
Fixed edit fields losing focus while typing when it triggers the refresh of a kind of (hierarchical) listbox (e.g. in the Particle Motion editor).
Fixed buggy navigation focus point (used as orbiting center and for navigation speeds) when only ground and/or water planes are selected.
In the Object Properties ("Numerics") panel, input in the X/Y/Z edit fields could end up in the wrong property when switching rapidly between Position and Rotation, for example.
Fixed many cases where the rendered scene preview restarted from scratch when manipulating objects that do not affect the render (non-active camera or its target, objects hidden from render or in hidden layers, objects added to a hidden layer).
Reorganize the Display menu to better group related items.
Prevent cameras from being created with a -4 exposure (especially Top camera, or cameras created from a Perspective camera), and fix wrong exposure in non-active cameras when loading an atmosphere with a different photometric status, same when saving and reloading a camera from a VOB in a scene with a different atmosphere.
Adjust 3DConnexion Space Mouse motion speed depending on the selection or scene dimensions.
Fixed issues with spline geometry effect meshes and terrain's 3D sculpting meshes which can be created in the wrong scene layer or stay visible when their "originating" object is hidden, and similar issues.
More helpful error message when OpenCL initialization failed.
More helpful error message when reading a PS/EPS/AI vector graphics file fails: recommend SVG format.
Fixed EcoSystem visibility issue in conjunction with the option "Show only objects from active layer" (viewports menu): EcoSystems from all layers were visible, whereas only EcoSystems from the focused layer should be.
When loading a scene from the Welcome panel, fixed the default viewport configuration being used instead of the custom one saved in a previous session (for a template scene), and the lack of a warning message when loading some non-template scenes.
Fixed motion speed when a single light or spline control point is selected.
Fixed edition of object under the mouse when double-clicking on a viewport's (transparent) caption bar to maximize the viewport.
More readable Layer name color when using the default Dark grey theme.
Fixed non-respect of the Camera Lock option when using the 3DConnexion SpaceMouse device.
Fixed navigation issues in the Timeline: not possible to zoom when using 3DSMAX navigation preset, pop-up menu showing after a pan on the Animation Property Bar, fix dysfunctional and possibly crashing mouse wheeling support on the Animation Splines Bar.
Fixed exposure in several (mostly top-view) displays: Spline Proximity node's internal spline editor, Terrain Editor's Zone Display, and two steps of the Animation Wizard.
Removed problematic feature in the EcoPainter: secondary action on the top-left corner icon button (to minimize the dialog) does not work properly and leads to confusion.
Fixed a message text referring to obsolete setting names, when converting objects to MetaClouds.
Fixed accelerator hints not showing in the Object Aspect's GL Display quality pop-up menu.
Fixed inconsistent message when changing both color and alpha channel using a single picture in the Alpha Plane editor, when the existing channel pictures have different dimensions.
Fixed Rendered Scene Preview using outdated sea parameters when the Water Surface is opened, and one clicks on the Scene Preview to manually refresh it.
Fixed scene's "Save" button not enabled when dragging a picture into VUE for use as a picture-mapped material.
More explicit message about assets in Content browsers that are available as separate downloads.
Fixed water surface options not working with some material from content.
It is now possible to hide a layer when object selected.
Removed a button doing nothing in SolidGrowth's Plant Editor (rename leaf/trunk subset).
Fixed the behavior of checkboxes in the render information strip options (were displayed as partially selected, and 2 clicks were needed to select an entry).
Removed a useless intermediate dialog when editing the number of variations of a plant in an EcoSystem.
Fixed population of multi-layer EcoSystems when the Material Editor is opened from the summary of materials or the World Browser.
In the World Browser, avoid showing materials of EcoSystem specimens no longer in use.
Fixed persistency of World Browser advanced options (show only material names, show only materials of selected objects...).
Avoided switching a material to dynamic population silently - happened typically when the material has some animated/published parameters.
Avoided refreshing the scene preview as soon as one edits a setting in the EcoSystem Material Editor.
Fixed wrong name and meta-information when replacing a plant by another species with the "Replace By..." menu.
Improved the display of specimen names in Material Editor and EcoSystem Painter, by displaying the preset name (if any) on a separate line.
Fixed preview mode option not sticking: was forced to "Show All Previews in Graph" each time the Function Editor was opened.
Fixed focus changes in Object properties making coordinates values being incorrectly changed.
Fixed double backup being added to Undo/Redo list when editing Object properties with Interactive numerical field changes enabled.
Fixed various bugs related to gamma correction and consistency between HSL/RGB values in ColorMap editor.
Added the ability to enable/disable the exposure of VUE cameras from the VUE render options for a better "artistic" control. Previously, their exposure was enabled with the "Post processing" checkbox, but it led to unexpected renders. The exposure value can be controlled by selecting a VUE camera then by selecting "Object Properties" in the VUE menu.
If no TPF plant variations are selected, loading is aborted.
INTEGRATION AND EXPORT
[NEW] Added the ability to bake the Reflection channel for non-PBR materials (also available in the Convert Tool in plugins).
[NEW] Improved TPF plant export using material baking.
[NEW] Animated wind is taken into account when exporting TPF plant animation.
[NEW] Improved FBX import/export.
[NEW] Added transparency support in C4D export.
[NEW] Added back side baking of two-sided materials when exporting without duplicated faces.
[NEW] USD and FBX export support tiling mode. (Mirror Tiling mode does not work for FBX, it is a FBX limitation).
[NEW] USDZ files creation no longer create construction files next to the final file.
[NEW] Added an option to split the USD exports in multiple files with one file per object and an assembly file for the scene.
[NEW] USD now exports lights.
[NEW] C4D export can use multi-instance or render instance for EcoSystems.
[NEW] C4D export the sky in a native object (use panoramic mode).
[NEW] C4D export PBR materials.
[NEW] C4D export VDB clouds as Volume Set.
[NEW] USD export VDB clouds.
[NEW] When exporting in USD on omniverse://, the objects will be tracked (activate Live Sync on omniverse). .
[NEW] Syncing on omniverse supports deleting of objects. .
[NEW] Added an option to replace pivot at the center of an imported object.
[NEW] Syncing on omniverse supports adding new object (geometry modification is not working yet).
[NEW] Add an option in USD export to use submeshes instead of GeomSubSet (to handle multi material meshes).
[NEW] Syncing on omniverse first support of geometry modification.
[NEW] Syncing on omniverse support of object renaming.
[NEW] Syncing on omniverse support of material modification.
[NEW] Add a Clarisse preset in USD.
[NEW] Syncing on omniverse support of object EcoSystem.
[NEW] Improve export of C4D animated VDB clouds.
[NEW] Improved export of USD camera focal and focus distance.
[NEW] Add clearcoat export in C4D and USD formats.
[NEW] Export clearcoat flatten.
[NEW] USD export Visibility (an object hidden from render will be hidden in USD).
[NEW] Added new option to export .vdb in multiple files.
[NEW] Preserve the EcoSystem hierarchy upon export (grouping instances together with the populated object) - in FBX, C4D and USD formats.
Fixed export of multipass render as PSD: extra components were always saved as linear whereas other color-like channels were gamma encoded. Now all components that can have gamma are encoded with the export gamma (see gamma options).
Fixed broken transition normal map in LeafCluster, billboard export and baked map export.
In the Export Options, the "occlusion treatment" option is now located just below the "ambient occlusion" checkbox.
Fixed a bug when writing a TIFF animation with alpha or depth channel bit per pixel different from the color channel BPP.
USD can now export to omniverse:// files and take advantage of omniverse live sync.
USD export now exports color Space. .
Fixed C4D export.
Improved error message when impossible to write an exported image because of image encoding.
Fixed some issues in the handling of Unicode characters in LWO and OBJ modules.
Store last user choice regarding Nuke import options in environment.
Fixed missing material file (.mtl) when exporting only billboards in OBJ format.
Fixed wrong value of the displacement depth (displayed as "height" in Cinema 4D) in Cinema 4D export preset.
Export the displacement depth in FBX files (even though it's ignored in most of applications).
Added an option to bake the displacement in the exported geometry (previously, it was automatically the case when the displacement channel was not selected in texture map options).
Improved detection of inverted normals upon import.
Fixed the handling of empty file paths in MTL files, in OBJ import (they were leading to confusing error messages).
Fixed the handling of Unicode characters in the reading of ZBrush files (.goz).
Fixed a memory leak when importing a FBX or Alembic file containing instantiated objects.
Fixed a potential memory leak when exporting a large mesh in 3DS format.
Fixed the export of displacement mapping (as a baked texture) when the displacement function is connected to a texture map with mip-mapping enabled.
Fixed the import of displacement map in OBJ format (was interpreted as 100% transparent material...).
Fixed atmosphere export in case of roll and animation of the main camera.
Fixed roughness constant value when exporting to USD.
Fixed branch blending options wrongly applied in presets where it is not present.
Fixed roughness constant value when exporting to USD.
Fixed import FBX camera in Target mode.
Fixed wrong LOD scaling factor.
Export zone does not exclude cameras and sunlight when they are out of export zone.
Fixed potential wrong atmosphere export image when path tracer is activated.
Fixed intensity of EXR export of atmosphere.
In the Real-World Import panel, when the import area's center is off view, zooming now operates towards the mouse position "as usual", not towards the view center.
Real-World Terrain Import detect tiles that are entirely invalid data and fall back to tiles at other levels, to work around "holes" in the data coverage.
Real-World Terrain Import panel display improvement when zooming out but lower level (coarser) tiles are missing: keep using (a reasonable amount of) the higher level (finer) tiles to fill the holes while the coarser tiles are being downloaded.
When the Real-World Terrain Import queried Sentinel tiles of level 16+, the server supplied them but they were only up sampled crops from the lower resolution tiles, resulting in blurry textures and uselessly high workloads for VUE.
Real-World Terrain view tooltip fix: altitude was not properly found when the view was zoomed-in too much.
Real-World Terrain imports resulted in terrain function graphs with two Altitude output nodes.
Better error reporting when OBJ import fails to open or parse material library files (MTL).
Fixed a regression since VUE R5 when importing Real-World Terrains where the base of the terrain would always be at Z=0 instead of the minimal altitude over the whole terrain ("pillar effect"), so that terrains at high altitudes could no longer be dropped onto the ground.
Fixed contrast issues in high altitudes (around 5000m and above) in the Real-World Terrain import dialog by using an additional color key in the default color map.
Fixed several issues when computing the level of tiles to import for Real-World Terrain data that may lead to insufficiently detailed data being used.
When importing a geo-referenced altitude file, retained its name for display in the "World Browser - Links" tab (formerly it used a generic naming convention).
Fixed baked map extension wrongly reset to JPG when exporting through Python.
Do not add an empty group to the scene when importing a file containing only cameras.
Fixed inconsistencies regarding animation options of PlantFactory species (unavailable when editing one plant's export options).
Fixed wrong UVs when exporting a non-square terrain with materials exported as baked texture maps.
Fixed wrong UVs when exporting a real-world terrain with materials exported by conversion of existing maps.
Fixed PlantFactory animation options (bones, points) wrongly greyed out when editing the plant's export options, depending on the export format used previously.
Fixed wrong scale when exporting a height-field terrain restricted to a zone.
Fixed EcoSystems becoming invisible in real-time views after a sky export (or a scene export including an export of the sky map).
Improved MetaBlobs FBX export with better transitions between materials.
Fixed the export of materials using a PBR Workflow Converter node (an empty metalness map was generated).
DENOISER
[NEW] Updated Intel Open Image Denoise from version 1.2.0 to 1.3.0: improved denoising quality (improved sharpness of fine details / less blurriness, fewer noisy artifacts), slightly improved performance and lowered memory consumption, bug fixes and speed improvement for recent processors.
[NEW] Updated Intel Open Image Denoise from version 1.3.0 to 1.4.0: improved fine detail preservation, reduced denoising memory consumption by about 35%.
[NEW] Updated NVIDIA Optix denoiser from version 7.0 to 7.2: improved denoising quality and lowered GPU memory consumption. NVIDIA driver 455 is needed.
[NEW] Added AMD Radeon Image Filter Denoiser version 1.7.0. Any hardware OpenCL, DirectX12 or Metal compatible should be able to run it (except on Apple ARM).
[NEW] Added a Denoiser Strength setting to modulate denoising process, which is available in PathTracer Options Dialog.
[NEW] Fixed a potential crash when using a denoiser with disabled multipass (both disabled in Render Option and in Denoiser Options).
MATERIAL
[NEW] Added support of Normal mapping "Link intensity to object scale" option on TPF plant.
[NEW] Added support for PBR clearcoat layer.
[NEW] Fixed proper independency of PBR clearcoat reflections and highlights from underlying normal perturbations.
[NEW] Properly filter PBR specular highlights with clearcoat tint.
[NEW] Added specific tab for clearcoat settings.
[NEW] Added automatic connection with substance clearcoat outputs.
[NEW] Added Normal Map Intensity and Flatten parameters.
Fixed Alpha output being connected to Projected Map's "Grayscale" output even when an actual alpha channel is present in the selected picture when switching to "Mapped picture" mode in the Alpha tab of the Material Editor.
Fixed the saving of EcoSystem materials with several layers from the Object Aspect dialog (or the world browser) so that they are reloaded with all layers.
PERFORMANCE
[NEW] Improved the speed of EcoSystem painting.
Cleanup previous temporary directories in a background thread to avoid delaying the application start.
Fixed graph related code with exponential behavior, affecting graphs with heavy combinatorics (lots of nodes with lots of interconnected data).
Improved speed of the thumbnail provider (for Windows explorer).
Improved loading time of compressed scenes containing a lot of plant EcoSystem populations (requires saving the scene in 2021.2 first). Up to 5x faster in some cases.
Fixed access to animated textures that was preventing proper multi-threaded render in some cases.
Small reduction of the scene loading time (tests showed a 4% gain for a scene with many images and filters in material graphs).
Reduced the loading time of scenes using thousands of images (for example, 19.3% decrease for 10000 images).
Improved rendering speed with V-Ray and Cinema 4D (around 20% faster when the number of rendering threads matches the number of CPU cores - when the number of threads is greater, the gain becomes huge because VUE did not take this setting into account).
Added multithreading and interruption possibility during the preparation phase before a render, notably when a ventilator influences an EcoSystem and therefore creates plants instances.
PLUGINS
[NEW] Added the possibility to include displacement map in native shaders instead of baking displacement on geometry.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / RenderMan] Implemented the conversion of materials to RenderMan shaders (PxrSurface).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / RenderMan] Added handling of two-sided materials.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / RenderMan] Fixed the conversion of the back of two-sided materials for RenderMan in Maya (the diffuse appeared black, and the backlighting was ignored).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / RenderMan] Added option to generate RIB archives for EcoSystem instances.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / RenderMan] Fixed several instantiation issues introduced by changes in RenderMan 24.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Added the ability to convert VUE materials to Redshift materials in Cinema 4D S24.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed a crash with the latest builds of C4D (S24.111) and Redshift (3.0.50).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] With Redshift in C4D, a protection was added to avoid potential problems with future versions (in case attributes are removed, they will be skipped instead of preventing the whole conversion).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] With Redshift in C4D, two-sided materials now have only one item (the root material) in the list of materials, instead of 3 previously (root, front, and back materials). The sub-materials are still accessible in the graph.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the creation of two-sided materials with Redshift in C4D, when the "use sprite node" option is enabled.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed a recent regression preventing the conversion of materials for Redshift in C4D.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the layout of Redshift material graphs in Cinema 4D (all nodes were overlapping).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] VUE materials with sub-layers can now be converted to Redshift materials in C4D (alpha maps are supported, but not the settings in the Presence tab for now. Also due to a Redshift limitation, only 7 layers can be converted.).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Improved the layout of Redshift material graphs in Cinema 4D to better see the hierarchy of nodes.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] VUE backlight and luminous properties are now converted for Redshift in C4D.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the gamma of texture maps for Redshift in C4D.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Added the ability to convert VUE materials to Redshift materials in Maya (layered materials not yet supported).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] VUE 2-sided materials can now be converted to Redshift materials in Maya.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] VUE materials using a PBR Workflow Converter node can now be converted to Redshift materials (it generates the appropriate maps for the diffuse, metalness and roughness channels).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] The VUE ambient occlusion is now converted to Redshift materials (mixed with the diffuse) in Maya and C4D.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] The Convert Tool now works in Cinema 4D S24 on Mac OS.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed a regression in Maya: the metalness/roughness/reflections maps were not connected if their intensity factor was less than 100%.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the compatibility with Redshift 3.0.45 in Cinema 4D (the color management was different so it may be helpful for users with this version).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Improved the layout of Redshift material graphs in Cinema 4D (when texture maps are shared between nodes).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the conversion of VUE simple materials under EcoSystem materials for the Redshift renderer.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Added the support of Redshift in Cinema 4D R23.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] In the Convert Tool Options, the check boxes to enable the baking of the ambient occlusion and highlight are now accessible.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] When a VUE material uses the reflection channel, then its highlights channel is now ignored (as specified in the User Story).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the baking of the hightlights channel (saving of the generated map + generation of UVs for the mesh).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Avoided the unwanted addition of color correction nodes in Redshift material graphs (probably due to an imprecision with the color correction in the VUE material editor. This also affected plants from the PlantCatalog. Now only color variations greater than 3/255 are considered).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the conversion of the highlights map without baking (recent regression). The global intensity associated with the map is also taken into account now.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] The VUE clearcoat can now be converted to Redshift in Cinema 4D and Maya (IOR and Flatten parameters still have to be fixed, and the baking is not supported yet).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] The Redshift coating transmittance is now enabled only when there is a non-white color tint to apply (to avoid the darkening of edges with low IOR value).
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] The flatten parameter of the VUE clearcoat is now converted to Redshift in Cinema 4D and Maya.
[NEW] [Convert Tools / Redshift] Fixed the conversion for Redshift after a reverted conversion for another renderer in Cinema 4D.
[NEW] VUE plugins now support Cinema 4D R25 (rendering + convert tool).
[NEW] [Convert Tools] Added the ability to convert VUE splines with a geometry effect.
[NEW] Improved conversion speed and performance in Maya for large EcoSystem populations, using MASH instancer for static instances.
[NEW] Added option to convert EcoSystems using Particle Flow in 3DS MAX, for better performance with 5k+ instances. LIMITATIONS: currently disabled with V-Ray and Arnold procedurals.
[NEW] Updated toolbars for Cinema 4D.
Fixed the conversion of plants with the "animated points" setting (some models had only small parts of their geometry animated).
Added the detection of the mismatch between the version of the current V-Ray renderer and the version of the VUE plugin, to warn the user that it may lead to problems.
The normals of VUE objects are now more accurate (for the display only, the render had no problem).
VUE now uses the number of processors defined for V-Ray (instead of always using all processors).
Fixed a regression in Maya that could make VUE objects and plants using several materials appear in light green in the real-time display.
Fixed a bug with the clipping planes of VUE cameras in Maya (if they were edited in the Maya interface, they were reset to initial values after some operations).
Fixed the display of VUE materials with several layers (now the bottom layer is used to display its maps, instead of the top layer which often contains less visible parts). .
Fixed an error message in the Maya script editor (saying the color of VUE materials couldn't be modified because it was already connected to a map).
Fixed a crash in the VUE plugin for 3ds Max, with scenes containing meshes using multi-materials whose sub-materials were shared with other meshes (regression introduced in R5). This fix may also improve the responsiveness as it avoids the useless recreation of unchanged sub-materials.
In Maya the scene is now correctly cleaned when closing VUE, which avoids problems when reloading the resulting scene (the useless automatic loading of the VUE plugin, or error messages when the plugin is absent).
Fixed the transformations of groups that were abnormally reset to their initial value when doing the first render of a session (with photometric atmospheres), or when changing the exposure control in 3ds Max.
Avoided a random deadlock when rendering with 3ds Max + Backburner + V-Ray. (It was linked to the use of several threads during the preparation of VUE materials and objects. Now a single thread is used, like in older VUE versions.).
The VUE plugin for V-Ray in 3ds Max is now compiled with the SDK from V-Ray 5 update 1.3 (implying a better compatibility with this version).
Fixed a crash when rendering a VUE scene with V-Ray in 3ds Max (if "render elements" different from the VRayDenoiser are present).
Fixed the closing of the VUE progress bar when saving large scenes (using the host app commands for saving).
Fixed the display of the mouse cursor in 3ds Max when hovering over VUE dialogs (it could keep the resizing icons instead of reverting to the arrow).
Fixed the unwanted modification of existing native cameras (translation in Maya, field of view in 3ds max) when adding the first VUE element (scene, object, atmosphere...). Now only the default perspective camera is moved to fit all objects of the scene in the view (+ orthogonal views in 3ds Max).
Fixed a bug in Maya with VUE materials containing dashes (-) in their name: it led to a light green display, and to invisible objects with the Convert Tool.
Fixed problems in the VUE Render Options dialog (the "deterministic indirect lighting" checkbox was ignored, and the "depth of field" checkbox and its associated edit button were useless, so they were removed).
VUE now correctly considers splines as selected after clicking on their geometry effect in the native scene (it makes their edition or conversion easier).
Removed 'Ambient Occlusion' from the list of available multipass layers, for it cannot be computed in the plugin context. .
Fixed the preview of Lens-flares in the Light Editor, which was never refreshed in the context of plugins.
Integrate camera/light synchronization directly in VUE plugins, to avoid having to install a separate VUE synchronization plugin manually.
Fixed the display of EcoSystem instances held by Boolean operations or MetaBlobs.
Avoided displaying a confusing warning when a default scene using a photometric atmosphere was defined by the user, but the atmosphere file just chosen to initiate a new project is *not* photometric.
Fixed a potential crash (and a fuzzy visual effect) when closing Maya while VUE plugin is in use (when trying to reset the grid properties).
[Convert Tools] Propagate bump depth property from original material to native material when we bake material maps.
[Convert Tools] Added conversion of Bump for Cinema 4D's Standard Renderer.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the transformation of instances with skeletons in Maya.
[Convert Tools] Fixed discontinuities in the normals of converted plants.
[Convert Tools] The original extension of texture maps is now preserved (instead of always using the .tif format). For baked textures, the default extension is now .png, as it is more standard format.
[Convert Tools] With the Maya Software renderer, the VUE alpha maps are now loaded in a way that is compatible with the NVIDIA Omniverse Connector plugin (the result in Omniverse was previously inverted).
[Convert Tools] With the Maya Software renderer, normal maps are now connected to materials in a simpler way so that they can be correctly exported to NVIDIA Omniverse (using the Maya Connector plugin).
[Convert Tools] The scale/offset/tiling parameters of the texture maps of VUE materials are now taken into account when converting them to native materials.
[Convert Tools] In the Convert Tool Options, "Don't show upon object conversion" is now applied to next conversions.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the specular weight when converting VUE PBR materials to Arnold and RenderMan materials.
[Convert Tools] In Maya the Convert Tool now generates .tex files for RenderMan to avoid missing textures (when rendering without the Local Queue).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the display of the progress bar when converting objects. Previously, it only showed 1% and was closed at the end of the conversion.
[Convert Tools] When materials are converted by using the original texture maps, the maps are now simply copied from the source folder to the destination folder (if they are present and not transformed) instead of being rewritten by the VUE image modules. It may reduce the conversion time, and it avoids an additional quality loss with the jpg format.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of materials whose texture maps are inverted in VUE (the color and normal inversions were ignored).
[Convert Tools] Fixed problems with the mapping of texture (scale/offset/rotation) on meshes with UVs, for the conversion and the display.
[Convert Tools] Fixed a crash when closing VUE after converting an object from a group with more than one level of children.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of VUE constant colors depending on the color space of the Cinema 4D scene.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of VUE PBR materials that are baked (either in "Automatic" or "Bake to texture maps" mode).
[Convert Tools] Fixed bugs when typing an output directory in the Convert Tool options (".fbx" was added to the path, and texture maps were not written).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of objects with options that generate separate texture maps, which can happen with the "Automatic" mode or "Bake to texture maps" combined with "Texture per material" for plants. Previously, only one texture was loaded in host applications.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the mapping of textures on VUE primitives (the UVs generated by VUE are now baked in the native geometries in order to better handle all cases, meaning that the scale/offset/rotation in the host applications are neutral and not mirroring the ones in VUE).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the application of the geometry resolution setting when converting VUE objects with the "Convert materials" or "Automatic" modes (ie. when materials are not baked). This was a regression introduced in R6. It did not affect PlantFactory plants (quality controlled in the plant editor).
[Convert Tools] Disabled a useless message when saving a VUE scene after a conversion (asking if prebaked data should be saved).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the mapping of textures when the color channel is constant (UV coordinates were not generated for other channels).
[Convert Tools] Fixed bug: some species of the PlantCatalog had materials considered identical whereas they were different (so not correctly converted).
[Convert Tools] Fixed bug: when several presets/variations of the same species were loaded in a scene/EcoSystem, new materials were created for each of them (now they are shared).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the names of converted materials: the root of 2-sided materials used the name of the front materials (all apps), and default names were applied to nodes in Arnold shaders (C4D).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the color space of texture maps in Maya (it could be wrong depending on the input color space rules in the preferences).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the intensity of displacement in Maya/3dsMax/C4D with all supported renderers.
[Convert Tools] Fixed a bug with the "revert" functionality (from the VUE world browser): converting the same object a second time ignored its material changes.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of metalness/roughness intensities in mapped picture mode from VUE to V-Ray in Maya and 3dsMax.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of the front of two-sided materials (wrong reflection settings for PBR materials, and wrong bump & displacement intensities).
[Convert Tools] Fixed a bug (R6 regression) when converting several VUE materials with the same name: the texture maps of the last converted material were used by all others. This fix is useful for PlantFactory plants.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of VUE highlights settings to RenderMan specular settings in Maya (which were producing a too reflective/shiny effect).
[Convert Tools] The maximum number of bones applied to the conversion of plants is now accessible in the options so that it can be increased (the default value of 500 previously hidden to the user does not always produces good results).
[Convert Tools] In Cinema 4D conversion dialog, when both Multi-Instances and Arnold Procedurals modes are available, use radio buttons instead of mutually exclusive checkboxes.
[Convert Tools] Added missing conversion of highlights and backlights when converting VUE materials using the "baked maps" mode.
[Convert Tools] Fixed wrong geometry scale when converting a procedural terrain.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of MetaBlobs and Boolean operations.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of infinite planes (ground, sea...).
[NEW] Added the ability to convert PlantFactory plants to Cinema 4D objects with bones (static or animated) or animated points.
[NEW] With the Convert Tool of the VUE plugin for Cinema 4D and for 3ds Max, VUE PBR materials are now converted to native materials for these renderers: Standard/Physical (C4D), ART (3ds Max), Arnold or V-Ray.
[NEW] Added the compatibility with Maya 2022 (the V-Ray renderer is not supported yet).
With the Convert Tool of the VUE plugin for Maya, VUE PBR materials are now converted to native materials for these renderers: Arnold, V-Ray and Renderman.
Added the compatibility with Cinema 4D S24.
[Convert Tools] The intensity of normal maps is now applied to native materials (for all renderers).
[Convert Tools] Fixed the application of the bump intensity and the orientation of normals for RenderMan in Maya.
[Convert Tools] Fixed the conversion of the alpha channel of the root of VUE two-sided materials. (It was ignored before. Now if it is defined, it overrides the alpha in sub-materials. A better fix will be done in future versions if necessary).
PATH TRACER
[NEW] Enabled back mip-mapped display for the interactive path tracer during the first passes to improve visual feedback when no denoiser is selected.
[NEW] Fixed don't cast shadows material flag handling for the full CPU intersector.
[NEW] Fixed wrong exposure during render for non-photometric atmospheres.
[NEW] Added compatibility with per-light cast shadow amount.
[NEW] Added support for the multipass global alpha channel.
[NEW] Properly handle PBR clearcoat flatten, as well as clearcoat normal mapping intensity settings.
When activating the Path Tracer while multi-pass is enabled, made sure we deactivate channels and masks not supported by the Path Tracer render engine, to avoid generating 100% black or messy pictures.
Fixed a bug where groups of meshes used as EcoIntances were losing UV (resulting in textures visual glitches) when rendering with PathTracer render engine.
Fixed a bug where terrains where not updated when their material scale was modified when using interactive PathTracer.
Fixed OpenCL memory leaks.
Prevent the Interactive PathTracer from re-enabling by itself (and not working properly) after undoing some other operation.
Fixed rendering of EcoSystem instances which material has "Subsurface Scattering" translucency.
Reduced the memory footprint of procedural terrains and speed up their preparation for the Path Tracer.
Fixed infinite refresh of Interactive Path-Tracing after extrapolating an object (by duplicating it, moving the copy and pressing the '*' key).
Improved the rendering of primitives in the path-tracer when their materials are using either normal mapping or displacement mapping (the meshes were too faceted).
SPLINE
[NEW] New option to allow a Spline Stroke Material Effect to access the spline's UVs in the material graph. U value can be either "Uniform" or "Stretched" (along the Spline) and can also be automatically rescaled so that mapping of a picture or pattern preserves its aspect ratio.
[NEW] Settings in the Effects tabs are encapsulated in foldable frames, which allows to resize the Spline Editor vertically (with scrollbars, if needed) to reduce its visual footprint.
Allow inserting control points by pressing Shift while clicking to add points near the existing spline curve.
Fixed a possible random ordering of spline control points.
Fixed selection changing when opening the spline editor on the whole spline.
Fixed lingering cubes in the viewports when deleting a spline's control point.
Fixed the "Material Fill" effect that failed to follow the spline curve (filling instead a polygon based on the control points only).
Fixed the Spline's Geometry Effect "Height" and "Z Offset" clipped to the slider ranges whereas they should not be.
Fixed the Spline's Material Effect "Preview as ribbon" checkbox sometimes forcibly checked when reloading a scene where it was unchecked.
Fixed color glitches in the viewports and use cones instead of cubes for tangent's end points.
Spline editor UX improvements: prevent editor from closing when deleting part of the control points and allow selection of individual control or tangent points with Ctrl+Click even when the editor is in "Add" mode (typically, when first creating the spline by picking points in a viewport, previously created points can now be selected and deleted without interrupting the workflow).
Fixed possible crashes when deleting a control point from a spline.
Fixed fill/stroke influence blending with the underlying object's texture when the spline effect material has transparency.
Fixed Spline Stroke or Fill Material Effect not applied on newly created objects until changing something in the Spline editor.
Fixed slider range of the "Path Finding" and "Resample Spline" dialogs (in the Spline Editor).
Fixed physical dimensions of Spline effects reloaded from a VOB saved with a different internal unit than the current scene.
More robust detection of spline end point proximity, before offering to close the spline instead of adding a control point very close to an end point. Also refresh the status of the Cyclic toggle button in the Spline Editor UI when the user answers "Yes" to close the spline.
Fixed render bugs on multi-material objects (e.g. imported models) when splines are present in the scene: render was affected even with material effects disabled, and effect was improperly applied when enabled.
Fixed Material effect width being half of what it should be (except when populating an Ecosystem!).
Optimize scene interaction when the spline editor is opened to add or insert points and the scene has a complex hierarchy of objects.
Fixed insertion of points into cyclic splines not always choosing the right curve piece ("segment").
Fixed insertion of points into splines sometimes choosing a location far from the curve itself, onto background objects.
Fixed insertion of points into splines when no scene object is visible behind the pointed location.
Fixed problems handling control points (trying to delete and move them) after deleting several ones at once from a given spline.
Fixed imported spline (from a vector graphics file) not replacing the scene object when loaded through "Replace by...".
Fixed imported spline not being automatically reloaded when the file is changed in an external application.
Group multi-curve vector graphics at import (fixes subobject placement when drag-dropping into VUE), offset to the group center for more intuitive scene placement, and rename imported group and subobjects after the filename.
Fixed saving cyclic splines (as VOBs or in VUE scenes): tangents for the extremities could not be reloaded correctly. Existing cyclic spline are detected and fixed when the VOB or VUE/FSVUE file is loaded.
Fixed spline terrain effect disabled when duplicating a spline, and not properly re-enabled when restoring from Undo.
Fixed custom user-chosen spline control points and tangents' names being overwritten by VUE.
Fixed rendering of spline Stroke and Fill material effects when the underlying object's material has Layer Presence settings.
Improved the UI to avoid inconsistencies when a spline's stroke or fill material has Eco layers but the corresponding "populate EcoSystem" setting is not enabled, leading to inoperant "Populate" actions in the material editor.
Fixed render using obsolete spline after applying "Path finding" or "Resample spline".
Points and tangents now correctly share their owner Spline's properties (Locked/Hidden/etc.) and cannot be assigned their own. When not set to Automatic, the color configured for the 3D viewport is used (a different color can be set for each point).
Fixed a crash when rotating an invalid spline (a spline with a single point, usually one that is being created) with the viewport gizmos. Also prevent pointless rotation and scaling from being applied at all on an invalid spline.
Fixed invisible spline when editing a Hidden spline and adding points, leading to only the newly added point to be selected and thus visible. Now the whole spline is displayed as soon as one control point or tangent point is selected.
Fixed useless and buggy dropping of splines as a whole: their points are now dropped one by one instead.
Fixed a potential freeze of the application when copy-pasting an EcoSystem material to the Geometry Effect tab of the Spline Editor.
Fixed wrong vertical offset of EcoSystem instances when populating along a road.
Fixed missing terrain lines in the Terrain Effect tab's list of influences: those belonging to groups.
Fixed lost modifications of the EcoSystem settings when the material is opened from the Spline Editor and the EcoSystem is not populated at once.
Fixed a potential corruption of the spline's materials when pressing Cancel in the Spline Editor.
Fixed the rendering of material influences on grouped objects.
Made sure the material influences defined in the Spline Editor never affect EcoSystem instances (could happen when a specimen was created from the existing scene).
PYTHON
[NEW] Save and restore VUE's Python console command history across application sessions.
[NEW] Added Python functions to get/set the current renderer (external or not) and network rendering.
[NEW] Added a Python function to change the denoising mode (for Path-Tracing render engine). Example of usage: eon.EONScene().SetDenoising(eon.Denoiser_NVidiaOptix).
Removed now-useless message asking the user to use asynchronous version of Rendering Python functions.
Access to the EONGeoInterface API described in the documentation.
Fixed the rendering of some Materials using Python, when the rendering occurs in the Standalone Renderer or the command line RenderNode.
Removed non-stop popup message when using the Python Drop function.
NETWORK RENDERING
[NEW] Added long due --help option to the RenderNode's command line.
[NEW] Added the possibility to override the denoising mode (for Path-Tracing render engine) from the RenderNode's command-line: use option -render_denoising).
Improve rendering speed of Physics Particles Ecosystem animations when using RenderCows: each frame required an increasingly long initialization time, as the frame position in the animation grew higher, which is no longer the case.
Fixed IP address unreadable in RenderCow About screen, in German version.
STABILITY
Fixed a crash when the browser explores directories with some "permission denied" folders.
Fixed random failures when trying to open the CrashSender after a crash on macOS.
Fixed potential crash while exit with interactive path tracer activated.
Fixed a potential crash in 3DS Max plugins when executing wrong MAXScript commands internally.
Fixed a potential crash related to displacement mapping, when the subdivision of an object is interrupted in the middle (for a material using uniform subdivision). This could happen with the scene preview, typically.
Fixed a potential memory corruption when rendering with the Path Tracer in the active camera view (problem occurring only with certain values of height).
Fixed a crash when deselecting an object if the material editor and material browser were still opened.
Fixed a crash when rendering the atmosphere's Snow or Rain effects after doing "Purge Memory".
Fixed crashes on macOS when closing the Atmosphere Editor while displaying the Wind tab.
Fixed a crash with some parameters of the "Recursive Strata 3D" filter.
Fixed a crash on macOS when starting VUE with a corrupted docking configuration.
Fixed random crashes when undoing the whole terrain edition session from the Terrain Editor itself using the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Z).
Fixed crashes when closing a window without closing first its Content browsers (at least in: Function browser opened from the Material editor, Material browser opened from the Material Summary or the Plant Editor).
Fixed possible crashes when editing both a Procedural Terrain (with a visible "isometric" terrain function preview) and its material.
Fixed possible crashes after cancelling a Procedural Terrain Editor and trying to re-open it immediately.
Fixed rare crashes when quitting the StandaloneRenderer (about once every 1000 runs).
Improved robustness of fast save mode (.fsvue), by catching more errors (no space left on device to finalize the scene file, typically).
Fixed a potential crash when editing a SolidGrowth plant created by replacing a previous plant of the same kind.
Fixed a potential crash when exiting the texture manipulation mode.
Fixed a potential crash when opening the Leaf Editor (from the Plant Editor).
DISPLACEMENT
Fixed Color To Vector used for displacement on vegetation .
Outwards-only option can now be set independently on each material layer.
Fixed custom direction (horizontal, vertical, or defined through graph) potentially lost upon baking or Path Tracing.
Fixed potential artefacts (wrong shadows) in displacement using uniform subdivision when depth is high.
Fixed potentially wrong shadows when the displacement amplitude is high, with dynamic subdivision only.
Fixed option "Affect material distribution" applied to all material layers for no reason.
Fixed uniform subdivision on meshes having more than 1 UV layer.
ANIMATION
Fixed a memory leak in MPEG1 and MPEG2 animation saving and repaired the options dialog from those formats on Windows.
Fixed area light parameters not refreshed when changing timeline.
Fixed ghost editor popping when clicking on color control.
Fixed wrong ranges for Render Sequence Start and End edit controls (both for Frame and Time).
Fixed wrong saving of MP4 animations for alpha and depth channels.
Make sure the Alpha channel is computed if the option is checked in the Animation Render Options panel.
Avoid repeating the same subdivision warning (TurboSmooth) at each frame and for each object.
Improved the behavior of "constrain current time" option when the scene has no key-frames but has an animation range defined by the user.
Preserved the target object's material when pasting the animation of another object.
ECOSYSTEMS
[NEW] Re-added the ability to move instances from an object's EcoSystem to a global EcoSystem. To use this, select instances with the EcoSystem painter, then click on the "Manipulate" button then select "Move Instances to...". The command "Change Instance Types to..." has also been fixed for global EcoSystems (the population list wasn't updated).
Fixed a bug preventing to save brushes in the EcoSystem painter when the associated material was encrypted (coming from Cornucopia3D or locked to a user license).
Fixed a bug preventing to open the material editor from the EcoSystem painter brush editor after selecting a new brush (previously it only worked for existing global EcoSystems already present in the scene).
Fixed the rendering of EcoSystems using PlantFactory species with the "Static Mesh" quality, after reloading a "Consolidated Archive" scene in VUE Standalone, and with all scenes in VUE hosted plugins.
Fixed the reloading of the quality boost of plants in EcoSystems (it was always reset to 0).
Fixed a bug in the edition of EcoSystems: after reloading a scene and manually locating a missing file for a plant in an EcoSystem, changing the plant quality re-added a separate plant. Now the existing plant is kept.
Fixed EcoPainter randomly (but frequently) slowing down when hovering the viewports, as well as "action" brushes (Scale, etc.) almost inoperant when in such a situation.
Fixed regular patterns appearing in 360 degrees population when the density is low.
Randomized 360 degrees population depending on the EcoSystem seed.
Fixed a potential memory leak when increasing the number of variations of a PlantFactory specimen.
Fixed potential ghost instances in OpenGL, when disabling the material effect of a spline.
Fixed performance issues (memory and time) when populating along a very large spline.
Fixed a potential crash when a same material using very small instances is populated over multiple objects.
Fixed a potential crash when enabling both dynamic and fast population on a spline.
Fixed potential precision issues (instances floating above the terrain, typically) when populating a procedural terrain.
Fixed potentially null populations in some cases of multi-layer EcoSystem materials.
Avoid displaying a question about luminous materials for materials which are no longer used by any specimen in the scene.
Avoid preparing unused specimen materials for the ray-tracer (this optimization was already live for the Path Tracer engine).
Improved the replacement speed of a PlantFactory specimen (when changing its quality) when there are many instances using it.
Fixed inconsistent results (lost underlying EcoSystems, typically) when populating an individual layer of a multi-layer material used by several objects.
Fixed inconsistencies in population results when sampling quality is boosted: the number of instances could jump very abruptly around certain values of the density slider.
Improved the evaluation of the instance count for spline effects using fast population mode, in order to avoid a warning in some cases.
Fixed wrong instance count displayed in Material Editor when copying an object holding instances (for copy/paste).
Fixed potential inconsistencies when editing an EcoSystem specimen material from the list of specimens in the Material Editor.
Fixed inconsistent handling of specular materials used by EcoSystem instances, leading to potential lighting errors.
Fixed potential loss of modifications done on EcoSystem specimen's materials in fast-save mode (.FSVUE files).
Fixed potentially wrong population (rectangular areas with no instance at all) of spline stroke effect using a large width, when some of the spline's angles are acute.
Fixed the creation of a population from an existing scene object when the latter has animation key-frames.
Avoided the duplication of EcoSystem materials when reading an EcoSystem using several presets of a same PlantFactory species.
Fixed displaced rocks (016b_lime boulder.sto, typically) sometimes floating in the air at render time (when the scene preview is activated).
DISPLAY
Fixed the display in OpenGL views to which a camera of the scene is assigned (the field of view and aspect ratio is now taken into account, instead of always using the settings of the active camera).
Fixed the position of the lens flare in OpenGL views on HiDPI screens.
Fixed support of Apple ARM M1 GPU which forced disabling the "Background draw" feature for no good reason and could also act in some cases as if the back-end driver was a software renderer (OpenGL emulation) instead of a proper hardware-supported renderer.
Fixed wrong display of Alpha Planes in Real-Time views just after their creation.
Fixed ghost objects in viewports after merging individual MetaBalls/HyperBlobs into a single one.
Fixed unexpected cloud billboards in the viewports after closing a scene with MetaClouds and creating or opening another scene with MetaClouds.
TERRAIN
Fixed a bug where cancelling edit in Terrain Editor made artefacts appears on terrain.
Fixed a bug where imported RGB image as terrain would cause the terrain to have the wrong heightmap until next switch back to VUE.
Fixed terrain mesh artifacts (bad interpolation = visible seams, torn meshes, etc.) when 3D-sculpting and when previewing terrains in the 3D viewports, improve code efficiency (parallelization & overall code optimizations).
Fixed conversion problems (related to overall vertical scale, zero-edge effect, and function scaling) when converting a Heightfield into a Procedural Terrain (with or without Heightfield-only nodes + improve performance of this latter case).
Fixed a vertical position and scale issue when converting a Procedural Terrain to a Heightfield.
Fixed both 2D and 3D sculpting being lost when converting a Procedural Terrain to a Heightfield.
Fixed a crash when undoing a cancelled Terrain Editor session involving 2D effects on a Heightfield terrain.
Fixed a material painting misbehavior: when both 'Sculpt' and 'Paint Material' are toggled, checking 'Invert' did not invert material painting, only the sculpting brush.
Fixed undo/redo issues inside the Terrain Editor (square artifacts, function changes not accounted for, scale, extension and gain not undoable for Heightfields, etc.).
Fixed interpolation artifacts with the Custom Erosion node when using the "Smallest Feature" parameter.
Use cubic interpolation to upsample Heightfields baked at an intermediate resolution (Reminder: the full resolution, if > 1024, is only baked for a "real" render, i.e. not for the Scene Preview).
Fixed render artifacts showing as "buggy" pixels (darker or lighter than their surroundings without a reason), actually betraying rays "missing" their intersection with the Heightfield terrain.
Fixed clipping slider issues for the top and bottom clipping planes in the Heightfield Terrain Editor: the altitude values displayed were often wrong, and the clipping planes changed altitude when changing the Heightfield's resolution.
Improve rendering performance for higher resolution Heightfields: about 10% for 2K/4K terrains, up to 30% for 8K terrains.
Fixed lost properties when converting a Heightfield to/from a Procedural Terrain: min/max clipping values, symmetrical flag, skin-only flag.
Fixed material layers not displayed in the Terrain Editor's Brush panel when editing a Procedural Terrain for the first time.
Improve resampling of material painting related data in the Terrain Editor.
Fixed crashes when changing the resolution of a Heightfield with Material Layers painted in the Terrain Editor.
Fixed material painting color changes not taken into account.
Fixed heightmaps (or other pictures) used in Heightfield graphs not showing in the "World Browser - Links" tab, hence not synchronizing.
Fixed non-georeferenced TIF pictures loading as if georeferenced, freezing the scene unit in the process, and not asking whether to be imported as Heightfield or Procedural Terrains.
Fixed Z scaling of non-georeferenced Heightfields imported from pictures.
Removed the Extension related widgets from the Terrain Editor U.I.: new terrains no longer use an Automatic Extension, as selecting the output range of the Altitude function is best left to the user. Existing terrains with Automatic Extension keep their last computed Extension upon reading, which becomes fixed, and is displayed as "Legacy extension" in the terrain editor. Consequently, the ad-hoc adjustments to a Procedural terrain's Extension that used to be made when changing the Altitude function scale or the Vertical gain have been removed. It was a legacy behavior, and Heightfield terrains never behaved like that, so the new behavior makes for a more consistent UX.
In the Procedural Terrain Editor, fixed a bad connection in the modified graph when extracting a zone by carving out the original terrain.
Fixed inconsistent vertical dimensions of newly created terrains, which depended so far on the terrain type (Heightfield vs. Procedural), and on the underlying grid resolution (even for Procedural terrains).
Fixed empty picture name in the World Browser - Links tab for terrain heightmaps or other pictures converted or generated internally by VUE (Geographical dataset import, Real-World Terrain imported heightmap or satellite texture, for example).
Fixed terrain heightmap or satellite texture not always scene along with scene files, when importing Real-World terrains.
In the Procedural Terrain editor, when extracting a zone by carving out a hole, switch the editor to the extracted terrain.
Fixed a possible crash when preparing the Terrain Preview (isometric 3D widget) in the Altitude graph.
Fixed 3D sculpted terrain sometimes becoming invisible in the 3D viewports.
Fixed 16bits pictures converted to 8bits the second time they were loaded into VUE as imported terrains.
Fixed the rendering of procedural terrains part of a group (altitudes were wrongly scaled along Z axis).
Fixed the ray-tracing of procedural terrains using displacement mapping, broken after a first render with the Path Tracer engine.
ATMOSPHERE
Ambient modulation now works as a multiplicative factor when "force ambient color" is unchecked.
Fixed 3D viewports' atmosphere preview never-ending update loop when several viewports display distinct cameras.
Fixed lost modifications of rain / snow material when saving with fast-save (or when reloading an auto-saved version).
[NEW] Convert EcoSystem instances to Arnold procedurals (proxy files in Arnold format) in 3ds Max, Maya and Cinema4D.
[NEW] The conversion is faster and more transparent (not using the 3D file import of host apps anymore, which made the user interface blink).
[NEW] Convert materials to native renderer materials (V-Ray, Arnold) for a better fidelity (In the previous version, default materials were used) in 3ds Max, Maya and Cinema4D.
[NEW] Added the ability to use the command "Convert to [3DS/Maya/C4D] Object" on native objects (Only the population is converted. If it's native instances, VUE simply releases them for the host application).
[NEW] Added compatibility with LightWave 2020.
[NEW] Added compatibility with C4D R23.
[NEW] Added compatibility with the V-Ray denoiser in 3dsMax and Maya.
[NEW] Improved generated maps by using Running Color algorithm, as we do for export.
[NEW] Allow normal map baking as well, when material export mode is set to "bake to texture maps".
[NEW] VUE objects (including TPF plants) can now be converted using V-Ray materials (tested with V-Ray 5 beta).
[NEW] VUE instances are now converted to C4D Multi-Instances (feature introduced in R20 and normally more efficient). If the creation of Arnold Procedurals is enabled in the options of the Convert Tool, standard render instances are used.
[NEW] Fixed the application of materials on converted populations with V-Ray.
[NEW] [Cinema 4D/Maya] Use new icons in Cinema 4D and Maya toolbars.
[NEW] Added the ability to load native objects into VUE EcoSystems when the renderer is Redshift or Octane. Then with the Convert Tool, the VUE EcoSystems can be converted to Cinema 4D multi-instances, which are well rendered by Redshift (Octane could not be tested yet).
[NEW] Apply current conversion options to EcoSystem specimens if no custom export options have been set to the converted object/specimens.
[NEW] Converted materials now have the same name as in the VUE scene (non-ascii characters are replaced by "_" at the moment to avoid any bug. They will be enabled in the next version).
[NEW] Fixed conversion of global ecosystems.
[NEW] Added the ability to abort the conversion of objects (baking process only for now), useful if it is too long.
[NEW] PlantFactory plants in VUE EcoSystems can now be converted with animation in 3ds Max and Maya.
[NEW] Added the ability to revert the conversion of global EcoSystems (like for single objects, they are moved in a separate layer in the VUE world browser).
[NEW] Added the ability to select the output directory for texture maps in the Convert Tool Options.
[Convert Tools] Export texture maps to human-friendly paths, so that the user can edit the exported maps afterwards more easily.
Fixed the display of texture maps on VUE objects with EcoSystem materials.
Fixed a potential crash after converting a VUE object holding an EcoSystem to a 3dsMax object.
Fixed Material Editor opening on the wrong material when coming from the plugin's World Browser.
[Cinema 4D] Fixed wrong preview of texture maps in Cinema 4D's viewports when tiling mode is set to mirror.
Fixed the World Browser created when loading a scene saved with the World Browser opened (was empty and unusable before the fix).
When saving the VUE part of the scene, skip native splines which have not been converted to VUE format.
Fixed EcoSystem instances not converted when held by a procedural terrain.
Fixed the conversion of TPF plants to native objects when they are loaded in EcoSystems with the "Static Mesh" quality (the mesh was rebaked which was useless).
Fixed the conversion of objects in EcoSystems with the export mode set to "Convert Materials (using original texture maps)".
[Maya] fixed disappearance of materials of converted objects after closing VUE.
Fixed conversion of groups of procedural terrains.
Fixed crash when closing VUE after converting a group.
[3dsMax] Fixed a possible crash when closing VUE after converting a native object with an EcoSystem on it.
[3dsMax] Fixed conversion of native groups with EcoSystems (instances were not attached to groups).
[Hybrid Rendering] Fixed the optional application of the VUE render options to the native renderers (the number of samples is now correctly converted, and the V-Ray sampler type is fixed for the currently supported versions).
Fixed a regression in the baking of materials using world coordinates for single objects in the scene (not in EcoSystems).
Fixed the handling of bump (maps and intensity) with the option "Convert materials using original texture maps".
Partially fixed the display of animable rigged objects, either when loaded as single objects in the VUE scene or as population items in EcoSystems (however if they contains several sub-meshes, only the first one appears).
[Maya] Fixed the display of EcoSystems as boxes when the Maya "hardware texturing" is enabled.
[CONVERT TOOLS] Fixed a crash when converting EcoSystems containing PlantFactory plants using the "Animated Mesh" quality.
Fixed a bug when converting an object using a material shared with another non-converted object in the VUE scene (crash in 3dsMax, and duplication of materials in Maya and C4D).
The mesh resolution of converted PlantFactory plants can now only be controlled from the Plant Editor (using the "global mesh resolution" published parameter, or the Refine/Simplify buttons). It also applies to plant populations.
Fixed the display of EcoSystem instances with the billboard quality.
Fixed the display of EcoSystems in Maya when the PlantFactory plugin is also present and loaded (EcoSystems were not visible).
Fixed a crash when converting a plant with animation a second time, if the first conversion was aborted.
Fixed a crash during the reopening of the Atmosphere Editor, if one had edited a cloud material from the previous instance of the Atmosphere Editor.
Fixed a crash when converting PlantFactory plants with bones (static or animated).
INTEGRATION AND EXPORT
[NEW] New USD export format which supports animated bones, point level animation, PBR materials, scene hierarchy, EcoSystem instances incl. USD point instancer for non-skeleton Ecosystems, panoramic skymaps, cameras and camera paths. You can either export as USDA, USDC or USDZ. We've also included a direct export preset for NVIDIA's Omniverse.
[NEW] FBX file format handling now supports objects hierarchy.
[NEW] Reworked export to native .c4d file format: support of displacement, EcoSystems, camera, 2-sided materials.
[NEW] Improved handling of highlight.
[NEW] Added double sided delta to move the polygons in case of double sided material (to avoid Z-fighting).
[NEW] Added highlight maps to bake to texture options.
[NEW] Added option to duplicate two-sided material face only.
[NEW] Export back material textures of two-sided materials even if 3D format does not support two-sided materials.
[NEW] Changed back orientation handling of C4d plugin ("good export" is XZY).
[NEW] Two-sided materials are correctly baked when using duplicated polygon option.
Fixed potential wrong normal when exporting animated planes.
Fixed final preset always used to render exported skymap.
Let the user choose the range and FPS of animation export.
Fixed reading of eHDR/BIL images by selecting their HDR header file instead of the BIL file (the header was confused as a Radiance HDR image file, which is another format).
Imported cameras are now centered with the objects if the option is checked.
When exporting entire scene, always save the atmosphere file (if any) in the same folder as the exported scene file.
Export ground plane, if any, when exporting the entire scene (restricted to a zone, like infinite terrains).
Fixed export of infinite terrains: the restriction to the export zone was wrongly shifted and scaled.
When activating export preview on an infinite object, propose to define the export zone at once.
Corrected export of baked texture maps color extension to be more gamma correct.
[Ptex] Upgrade library to version 2.3.2 (minor upgrade).
Fixed reset export options between two exports.
Fixed a potential crash when exporting ambient occlusion for an EcoSystem specimen.
Fixed some map name that are not supported by the filesystem.
Fixed a potential crash when exporting a same EcoSystem (or an entire scene containing EcoSystems) twice.
Fixed potential issues in ambient occlusion export, when a PF species has a time-dependent graph.
[OBJ] Fixed loading texture names with double-quotes in the MTL.
Fixed inconsistent UI in some cases: when exporting exactly 1 object having custom settings, the default export settings were possibly displayed instead.
Make sure per specimen export options are correctly saved (bug specific to fast-save mode).
Fixed material export mode always reverting to automatic when loading a scene.
Editing default object export options should not require any export zone.
Fixed inconsistent scale of EcoSystem instances when global export scale is different from 1.
Added a warning when exporting TPF plants with baked texture mode while plant contains node with disabled baking option.
When loading a preset in export dialog, do not override settings that are not disabled (typically, we used to switch baked maps to JPEG).
Fixed potential crash when exporting point level animated plant twice.
Detected flipped vertex normals upon import, and propose to fix them.
Fixed a potential crash in case of export of very badly formed meshes.
Blender preset extract alpha by default.
Fixed the baking of Ambient Occlusion for most of objects (were 100% white).
Fixed invalid library dependencies on macOS (necessary for LW2020 on macOS 10.14 but may betray other problems).
Fixed wrong scale and pivot when exporting a single billboard.
Fixed the export of a spline's EcoSystem instances when the spline has no geometry.
Avoid repeating the question about dubious vertex normals: instead, apply the same choice for all meshes in the imported file.
Fixed potential failure of Alembic export when exporting an EcoSystem with different species.
Fixed wrong scaling of VDB clouds when exporting entire scene.
Fixed missing data from USGS imagery layers (PNG tiles without the PNG extension could not be read, while JPG tiles without the JPG extension could).
Fixed texture mapping artifacts in the PathTracer for Procedural Terrains imported and textured using the Real-World Import panel.
Fixed VDB cloud exporting only the bottom part of a cloud zone.
MISC.
[NEW] [ATMOSPHERE] Sharpness modualtion no longer limited to 100%.
[NEW] Added Cloud specific input in "Object Specific" input node in Clouds Material Graph for Cloud Height, Starting and Ending Altitude and also for Ambient lighting.
[NEW] Added support for the new macOS 11 version (on Intel chipsets only!), with one known limitation: HiDPI only supported on multiple screen setups if all monitors are HiDPI (hybrid multi-screen setup isn't supported yet).
[NEW] Implemented compression in .tpf format (option was ignored previously, when saving species).
[ATMOSPHERE] Fixed modulation of clouds connected to a constant not updated when the value of the constant change.
Fixed artefacts with OpenGL meshes of symetrical terrains.
Fixed black hole on Terrain in render when painting altitudes in Terrain Editor.
Fixed opposite modification being applied when canceling Terrain Editor.
[TerrainEditor] Fixed interpolation when doubling/halving terrain and improve performance.
[macOS] Minor optimization of the terrain brushing subsystem (some loops were only running on all cores on Windows).
[TERRAIN] Fixed crash when use "reset 2D only".
Fixed Heightfield function error when 2D-painting for the first time and the "last" node (the most downstream) in the graph is NOT connected by its first output (eg Grayscale output of any Texture map node, Roughness output of a Fractal node, etc.).
Stop update process when we cannot create back folder.
Fixed errors when reading some of the particle systems available in the content library.
Fixed CrashSender unable to find macOS crash file (at least on Catalina).
ECOSYSTEMS
[NEW] Added the possibility to clean the EcoSystem cache from the General Options panel.
Fixed wrong materials when a specimen based on a SolidGrowth (.veg) species uses displacement only on a sub-part of the plant.
Fixed modified season not taken into account in EcoSystem after saving the plant as species (because of remaining variation).
Fixed invisible instances when the EcoSystem is created from an object hidden from render.
Fixed EcoSystem instances sometimes disappearing from viewport (at the end of scene preview).
Fixed the inability to open the ecosystem painter from the material editor if the current material had a mixed/grouped/2-sided material above it in the layer hierarchy.
Fixed potential artefacts with PlantFactory species (blurriness introduced by the handling of LODs), when rendering static scenes.
MATERIAL EDITOR
[NEW] Added option to define displacement depth with real dimensions. Warning: this is not only a display question: the displacement will actually be computed differently if your objects uses a non-uniform scaling, or if the edited material is used by more than 1 object. Limitation: if several instances use the same material and have different scales, the depth will be computed only once for all instances (for obvious performance reasons).
[NEW] PBR: it is now possible to edit the "Origin of material" and "Global transformation" for PBR materials, in the effect tab of the material editor.
[NEW] PBR Replaced minimum reflectivity setting with specular level, in range [0, 1], corresponding to [0%, 8%] minimum reflectivity, to conform to other software.
[NEW] PBR Enabled PBR Workflow and Emissive to Luminous converter nodes image mapping without a Substance node (for texture display in OpenGL and interactive path tracer viewer).
[NEW] Indicator for geometric map transfos in material editor, and display the size taking into account the map rotation. Display the original size in the gamma dialog.
[NEW] Properly handle variable highlights over PBR materials for both the raytracer and the path tracer.
[NEW] Added "Extend" texture clipping mode (also called ClampToEdge) that uses the value from the nearest pixel when UVs are outside of the texture. Note it is not yet fully supported for plugins/export.
Corrected modified image detection for "incorporated and synchronized" images (changes done after the scene save were not detected).
Made the ambient occlusion tab visible in the advanced material editor.
Improved support of custom graph for normal mapping.
Material scale is correclty taken into account for preview.
Fixed uvs of baked primitives.
Improved consistency of displacement depths in mixed materials.
[Material Editor] Applied the same Displacement subdivision strategy to the whole material hierarchy, and never propose to animate it.
Reduce memory footprint in case of Displacement uniform subdivision.
Corrected texture map autoloading when loading from highlight map.
Used recognized file tags to avoid asking data type and check connection in material graph.
Added option to ignore displacement for next render, when the required memory exceeds the warning threshold.
Set linear gamma for maps that require it when loading it from inside the material graph.
Automatically use the right mipmap computation depending on whether an image is color or data (avoids problems when the gamma is not set correctly on data image).
Fixed possible random gamma assignment to content objects.
Fixed broken color inversion in render.
Fixed interpolation artefacts that occurred mostly with rotated/flipped images.
Fixed incoherent shading in case of dynamic subdivision, when the displacement depth becomes high.
PATH TRACER
[NEW] The path tracer now supports NPR (Non-Photorealalistic-Rendering).
[NEW] The path tracer now supports dynamic relighting.
[NEW] During offline render, incremental denoised renders are displayed. One can switch between noised and denoised displays in Render Display.
[NEW] [Denoiser/NVIDIA] Improved feedback when graphic card is too old to support NVIDIA Denoiser (need Maxwel architecture or newer).
Fixed a bug where renders with large resolution and high sample-per-pixel count never reached the end.
Improved error retrieval during denoising.
[ProcTerrain] Fixed "Object Parametric" texture-mapping of Procedural Terrains in the PathTracer.
Optimized the preparation of EcoSystems in offline render, when the scene contains specimens which no longer participate in the scene.
Reduced textures conversion time (VUE scene to PathTracer) by 70%.
Avoided out-of-memory error for denoiser with Interactive PathTracer when resizing the view.
Fixed crashes with materials using Subsurface Scattering, especially when used with EcoSystems.
RENDERING
[NEW] Reduced the rendering time of some cloud layers by 19% when their density function is not animated. It does not change the color output.
[NEW] Use computed scene preview auto-exposure as auto-exposure initial value for render.
Fixed the rendering of outlines on the first object in the scene when there is no ground plane.
Slightly speed-up non-PBR render with reflection when "Sensitivity to incidence angle" setting is zero.
Avoid artefacts in ray-tracer when a boolean operation contains a low-resolution mesh with smooth normals.
[Ray-tracer] Avoid numeric errors leading to white pixels when the refraction index (computed from the graph) has unexpected values.
Better computation of mipmaps regarding opacity and gamma correction.
Fix old render bug that incorrectly inverted mesh normals (symptom was very visible badly ligthen triangles).
Fixed some crashes with render area and path tracer denoiser (and high DPI).
Detected and fixed wrong normals when reading scenes/VOBs from previous versions.
[NETWORK RENDERING] Optimized transfer of texture maps from HyperVue to RenderCow (especially important for very large textures using a compressed format).
[NETWORK RENDERING] [HyperVue] Fixed "Add" button not working anymore.
Fixed a possible crash when using multipass EXR.
Fixed the saving of multi-layer EXR when masks are checked in Multi-Pass options.
PYTHON
[NEW] Added new Python function ExportSky.
[NEW] Give more control to export, by extending SetExportOption.
[NEW] [PathTracer] Add function to tweak (esp. reduce) quality of texture maps as well as terrains & Metaballs/Hyperblobs.
[NEW] Avoid interactive message when selecting camera from python at non-zero time.
[NEW] [Splines] Fixed handling & default configuration of spline effects through the 'EffectPath' class.
SPLINES
[NEW] Support ""Scalable Vector Graphics"" (SVG) as import format for spline objects. Stroke width can be read on imported Splines through the python API 'GetExtraAttribute_float', mapped to key 'width', and the color using keys 'color_r', 'color_g' and 'color_b'.
[NEW] Allowed loading vector files like object (model) files. Makes it easier to reach and also allows loading them from the python API 'LoadObject' + enables multi-selection.
Avoid losing closed spline status when resampling.
Make control/tangent points visible even when the editor is closed (but when the spline or one of its points at least is selected).
Fixed selection of control/tangent points working randomly when using a Geometry Effect.
[OpenGL] Fixed preview of texture-mapped Geometry Effects.
SPLINE [Displacement] When baking to polygons, Displacement can now be baked on "Geometry Effect" meshes.
Fixed splines bounding boxes in the viewports.
SPLINE [OpenGL] fixed effects meshes (Geometry & Ribbon) ignoring spline's properties (hidden status, lock status, preview color, etc.), and lingering after deleting the spline object or disabling the effect.
Fixed Spline Geometry Effect's 3D preview mesh not rebuilt when moving control points or tangents.
STABILITY
[NEW] [Imagery/Operations/Conversions] speed up image operations (parallelize).
[NEW] Improved generation time with TPF complex plants (25% less time on a test plant with about 1.5M primitives).
[Real-World Terrain] robustness against unexplained case of null resolution and to try and work around an unexplained crash.
Fixed a potential crash in HyperVue when rendering image sequences.
Fixed a potential (rare) crash in batch rendering when auto-save is activated when the job is submitted.
Fixed a potential crash in RenderNode when trying to read a scene not embedding the EcoSystem specimen variations.
Fixes possible crash in the floating "pulsing" progress dialog (used when rendering Substances with the GPU engine).
[Options] Fixed crash on macOS when typing "0" in the "GL polygon limit" field in the Display options panel.
Fixed various random crashes happening after editing objects.
Fixed potential freeze of the application related to images.
Fixed loading of greyscale 32f images from scenes.
Fixed a crash when encrypted items are missing to render a scene and are replaced by a dummy cube.
[ThreeNoiseFractal] Fixed infinite loop when Position input to this fractal has been multiplied by zero in the graph (by mistake or in the course of typing another value).
Fixed potential crashes when camera height lock is activated, and some vegetations use animated materials.
Fixed crash when using rectangular maps with rotations and flips.
Fixed (rare) possibility of crash in graph handling.
[Rendering/SkyDome] Fixed rare crash due to calculation precision and/or invalid meshes, happening typically during prepass.
[Booleans] Improve interruptibility of Boolean operations (might cause the Autosave process to freeze the UI waiting for a background Boolean operation to yield).
Fixed error and/or freeze on MacOS when trying to display the "very large terrain mesh" warning in Terrain Editor.
Fixed invalid normals leading to render artifacts with some older VUE meshes (including some from shipped content).
Fixed crash after unchecking "Displaced water surface" in the Water Surface Options panel.
Fixed a crash when the Material Editor is closed by deselecting all objects but a material browser is still opened.
Fixed a potential crash when transforming a vdb cloud just after the import.
Fixed a crash after selecting the "Paint material" brush (in the Terrain Editor) without using it, then closing and re-opening the terrain editor.
Fixed a potential crash when dropping an object to another one, when some normal mapping is involved (from scene 'moor.vue').
Fixed deadlock when trying to show more Ecosystem Specimen in the viewports than can fit in the allowed video memory footprint.
SUBSTANCE
[NEW] Use of GPU engine to speed up .sbsar texture rendering, especially for large sizes (1024 pixels x 1024 pixels and above). This option is only available in the graphical user interface version of VUE, not in RenderNodes. It can be disabled in General Options panel.
[NEW] Displayed the .sbsar parameters which affect the connected output in material editor tabs (this may not work if other nodes are connected in between the Substance node and the graph output).
[NEW] Handle new .sbsar input position type (v8 engine) as regular 2-dimensional number type.
Fixed crashes at render (introduced since rotate/flip output textures ability).
[Network Renderering] Fixed deadlock when leaving the application (at least with StandaloneRenderer).
Fixed bad handling of 16-bit integer encoded .sbsar outputs (notably fixes ambient occlusion with PathTracer).
Fixed crash when tweaking intensity sliders over Substance widgets in material editor tabs.
Hide Invert checkbox in material editor Normal tab when map comes from a Substance.
Removed gamma selection for .sbsar image inputs.
Fixed handling of 16-bit integer and 32-bit float encoded images in .sbsar image inputs.
Fixed material editor published parameters tab not updating other tabs and material for parameters published from Substance nodes or constant nodes connected to Substance node parameter inputs.
Fixed inverted red and blue values in processing of 16-bit integer and 32-bit float encoded images for .sbsar image inputs with CPU engine.
Fixed 2 and 3-dimensional number .sbsar inputs displayed with slider widgets when no boundaries are defined for value.
Fixed preset not changing to Custom when a parameter input is changed.
Fixed crashes and glitches on .sbsar preview map in widget.
Removed the black border on previews in the material browser, to be like any other preview.
Made sliders stick to integer values upon release for .sbsar 2, 3 and 4-dimensional integer inputs.
Do not display slider when min and max values are the same for .sbsar integer and float inputs.
Fixed normal map by automatically selecting OpenGL normal format if available when loading a .sbsar preset.
