Release Notes

 

VUE and PlantFactory build 2003711

Release date: April 24, 2019

 

VUE

  • [NEW] OpenVDB clouds now supports import options.
  • [NEW] Added mapping option for OpenVDB cloud
  • [NEW] Added cloud modulation for MetaClouds and VDB volumes
  • [NEW] Users can choose VDB grids to export
  • [NEW] Optimization of VDB saves
  • [NEW] Multi-thread cloud export
  • Fixed cloud export importing with wrong orientation in c4d
  • Fixed crash trying to import VDB with no scalar grid
  • Fixed sea level preventing export of clouds
  • Corrected filter type for cloud density (and other data)
  • Fixed clouds not exported in VDB when too many steps (overflow)
  • Fixed atmosphere export coherency artifacts
  • [NEW] [Plugins] Added compatibility with 3ds Max 2020.
  • [NEW] [Plugins] Added compatibility with Maya 2019 (no compatibility with V-Ray Next and no Mental Ray).
  • [NEW] [Plugins] Added compatibility with LightWave 2019.
  • [NEW] [Plugins] Improved render speed in all host applications whenever there are spectral clouds, texture anti-aliasing or Boolean operations.
  • [NEW] When exporting heightmap, set 16bits as default precision for every image format (including PNG).
  • [NEW] Allow changing some post-processing options in the plug-ins (including artistic gamma tweak).
  • [NEW] [import/Terrain] automatically center non-geolocated altitude rasters instead of popping up mostly useless centering dialog
  • [Plugins] Fixed potentially wrong rotations in Maya on Mac OS (either in gui or in Mental Ray/V-Ray).
  • Fixed a memory problem when closing C4D on Mac (detected in debug mode, not sure if it caused a crash however)
  • [Export] Fixed C4D export preset (alpha treatment and texture maps not in sub-folder).
  • [Convert Tool] Fixed conversion of some plants in C4D (missing alpha in leaves).
  • Fixed problems in the Plugins render options: when selecting the "User" quality preset, the previous one remained checked, and the "Custom" settings in the Advanced Effects sub-dialog could be disabled.
  • Fixed export as obj for some corner cases
  • Fixed export as fbx for some corner cases
  • Set default file format to PNG for Terrain Heightmap export in Unreal Export Preset.
  • [ZBrush Link] Fixed a bug where each click in GoZ button inside ZBrush would open a new VUE instance when the origin object does not originally come from VUE.
  • [Import/Terrain] Fixed terrains exported from VUE's terrain editor being reimported with holes where altitude is in the upper half
  • [Import/Terrain] Fixed vertical scale of 35km when importing terrains exported from VUE (initial scale is still lost but at least now a more reasonable value is used)
  • [Plugins] Fixed the display of substance materials
  • [Plugins] improved the display of mixed and 2 sided materials when they use texture maps. Now the map of the first sub material will be shown (like in the OpenGL display of VUE).
  • [NEW] Added support of Displacement mapping
  • [NEW] Added support for camera backdrop.
  • [NEW] Added support for texture map repeat modes (repeat, mirror, or once).
  • [NEW] Added generalized support for backlight and highlights.
  • [NEW] Added support for highlight color output.
  • [NEW] Added support for 2 sided materials
  • [NEW] Added support for texture mapped luminous output on path tracer side.
  • Fixed bad vegetation object conversion to the path tracer in mixed quad/triangle polygon mode.
  • Fixed potentially missing physical caustics from the sun in photometric mode.
  • Prevent render buffer transfer and render display OpenGL texture update when no new samples are accumulated into the buffer.
  • Grey out "OpenGL atmosphere preview" option in Options when PT running (and show tooltip to explain why)
  • Fix possible instabilities when closing the scene or quitting VUE
  • Resume path tracer when changing auto-pause options (eg when adding some more time, or disabling the auto-pause)
  • CPU usage now (almost) zero when path tracer is paused or disabled
  • Fixed intensity of reflective caustics generated by refractive objects in the path tracer.
  • Fixed never-ending interactive path tracer refreshes when duplicating area lights.
  • Fixed mesh and plants billboards rendering in the path tracer.
  • Fixed a rare case of directional lights wrongfully considered as the sun the path tracer.
  • [NEW] Loaded Substance cache mechanism
  • [NEW] Hide channel Substance parameters when detected
  • [NEW] Speed up Substance previews
  • [NEW] Handle 4-dimension Substance parameters
  • [NEW] Display Substance parameter groups
  • [NEW] Display component labels for 2-int and 2-float parameters when any (X/Y remain by default)
  • Fixed picker values for color parameters
  • Fixed crash in Terrain editor after Export Dialog has been closed
  • [Viewport] Fix crash when VUE starts up with a maximized viewport and you demaximize it
  • Fixed potential crash in plant editor
  • Fixed some random application crash
  • Fixed crash (stack overflow) when rendering reflective materials in C4D.
  • [Collada/DAE] Fixed crash on some files (following customer report with file exported from SketchUp)
  • Fixed crash when enabling NPR from camera options
  • [Legacy Standard Terrains] Fixed memory leak when converted to Heightfield at load time
  • [EcoSystem/DynamicPopulation] Fixed a potential crash when the camera is inside a dynamic EcoSystem using a very low density.
  • [VUE/TurboSmooth] Fixed potential crashes with multi-material meshes.
  • Fixed a crash in the Text Editor when selecting a sub-letter in the world browser.
  • Fixed partial freeze on text editor
  • Fixed potential crash when saving collection xml
  • [UX] Fixed navigation blocked when intersection returns an invalid position
  • [Cameras] Fixed crash when leaving VUE and using "specific camera" viewports + clean/optimize closing time wrap-ups a bit (eg. useless viewport resizing)
  • Fixed the freeze of the OpenGL display when a material uses an image sequence
  • [Scene Preview] Fixed potential random crashes with displaced objects holding EcoSystem instances.
  • [Save Object] Fixed potential conflicts with the auto-save thread, possibly leading to random crashes.
  • Fixed crash when sorting materials by name in the world browser.
  • Fixed potential crash when deleting key frames
  • Avoid crashing on exit when dealing with application error
  • [NEW] Improved default OpenGL polygons limit (new default = 5Mpolys per GB of total VRAM). Note that values of 1Mpoly will be assumed to be the old default unchanged, not a value set or left on purpose, so the polygons limit may change "behind your back" but normally for the better.
  • [NEW] [mesh_IO/animation] Speed up the reading & writing of deformable meshes (eg. imported Alembic meshes).
  • [NEW] Fixed severe slow-down when background draw thread is disabled
  • [NEW] Prevent waiting on draw thread inside UpdateWindow (allowing draw thread again on Mac!) and improve responsiveness noticeably for large scenes
  • [NEW] [MacOS] Improved various process speed using multi-thread computation: skybox computation for OpenGL preview, Function adding for Terrain Editor, various computation: marching cubes, symmetrical objects, terrain slope computing, compute bounding box for Terrains...
  • [NEW] Improved render scene preview responsive when there are a lot of materials in the scene
  • [NEW] [GlobalNodes] optimization of about 5% on Blur & Slope/Convexity nodes
  • [OpenGL] Fix severe slow-down when background draw thread is disabled
  • Avoided various useless updates of previews (material and/or scene) when using material editors (simple, volumetric, etc.) and doing trivial actions like changing the tab, clicking in edit fields, activating another dialog, etc...
  • Avoided a useless update of the scene preview just after opening object editors
  • Avoided another useless restart of the scene preview (with a finished render) shortly after opening the Camera Options.
  • Disabled useless updates of the scene when the material editor loses the focus (wihch may avoid slowness problems in some cases)
  • Fixed slowness (potentially big) when opening the system browser when the current folder contains many or large images.
  • Fixed slowness (regression) in the atmosphere editor when switching the light tab (when there are many objects in the scene)
  • Prevent (non-reproducible) crashes related to camera index in caption dialogs
  • [NEW] Updated filter dialog
  • [NEW] Made the scrolling smoother in the parameters area for published parameters when the graph is heavy.
  • [NEW] Hide MetaClouds spheres in the WorldBrowser
  • [NEW] Dynamically apply torus & metablobs options in scene preview
  • [NEW] Added the ability to load objects from the scene in ecosystem materials (new button)
  • [NEW] EcoPainter now also has the ability to load native objects
  • [NEW] Zoom where the mouse is in graph view, handle slowdown key, allows smaller zoom.
  • [NEW] Grouped materials in a sub-menu (in mat preview > down arrow > popup)
  • [NEW] Added the ability to copy/paste images in the material and function editors (from the popup menu)
  • [NEW] [Material Editor] Added automatic opening of image browser when switching to Mapped Picture mode
  • [NEW] [Material Editor] moved material's render options in separate dialog
  • [NEW] Added the ability to delete material layer from the popup menu (in the world browser and material editor)
  • [NEW] [Material Editor] top part can now be resized (to enlarge the list of layers) 
  • [NEW] [UI/Mac] Multi-monitor setups: lift limitation to horizontal-only arrangements
  • [NEW] [Browsers] New shortcut Alt+click on "Load..." buttons allow to bypass VUE's Content browser and jump directly to the OS native browser just once.
  • [Render Stack/Mac] Fixed "Fullscreen" feature for main monitor (Note: still KO on non-main monitors, both on Win & Mac)
  • Fixed the inability to reload quality settings for render stacked in a previous VUE session and using a non-user preset (=preview/final/etc...)
  • Mac: Fixed the access to a specific popup menu when right-clicking on the thumbnail of renders in the stack
  • Fixed MetaCloud renaming when selected in the world browser
  • Fixed useless scrollbar in export options
  • Mac: Fixed autosave freezing VUE when it happens during a render (which is possible only when the menu Render > Render is used, not when rendering using a button or the F9 shortcut...)
  • [Heightmap/import] Fixed regression (from R1P1) when importing non-geolocated terrain but "center terrain" is disabled in the import options dialog
  • Fixed "Edit graph" button in German (truncated) and in French (too tight).
  • Fixed several correspondence problems between the OpenGL skybox and the actual render.
  • Improve published parameters color on light grey default
  • [AVX] Fixed resume render when using global illumination.
  • [Boolean operations] Fixed boolean mesh operations (aka CSG) often yielding buggy results (regression from Vue 11)
  • [Render/Abort] Fixed abort render broken on Windows when uptime is close to 25 days
  • Fixed the selection of bevel and extrusion profiles in the text editor
  • Fixed a bug with the ecosystem painter: hidden objects don't block the effect of ecosystem brushes anymore (like the eraser and others)
  • Fixed a bug with published parameters in the volumetric material editor: their tab is now correctly shown/updated when adding them from the function editor.
  • Fixed wrong icon for CSG union
  • Fixed flickering on caption dialog icons
  • Do not save main window position on plugins
  • Fixed old bug when opening the camera options: the post process settings were disabled in the VUE scene preview.
  • Fixed Material Editor maximize
  • Fixed a bug with "Select Render Area": when used after a full render in the main view, it made the render disappear.
  • Fixed old bug when opening the camera options: the post process settings were disabled in the VUE scene preview.
  • Fixed wrong Render area when scene loaded from startup dialog
  • [Material Editor] Fixed disappearing new load save button
  • Fixed Export dialog size
  • [Terrain Editor] altitude clipping slider always reacts interactively
  • [Gizmo/HiDPI/Mac] Fixed gizmo axes position in hidpi on mac
  • [Scene loading] don't ask user which viewport config to load when loading template scene or creating new scene using default scene
  • [EcoSystem/FastPop] Fixed a bug blocking the interactive population (in Material Editor) as soon as a layer uses particles below the edited one.
  • [VUE/export/clouds] avoid altering global export options when exporting only clouds.
  • Fixed selection problems in the world browser when opening/closing the Text Editor
  • Fixed potential loss of texture filtering setting when using the render options
  • Removed compression frame and slider for PNG options.
  • Improved focal display to avoid strange clamping situation
  • [Function Editor] Fixed preview of nodes in parametric mode
  • [UI] Fixed active view status not passed to another view when closing active view
  • [UI][CameraControls/view-through] Fixed view-through spotlight not operated in some cases + navigation speed & orbit point not correct in this mode
  • [UI] Minor File menu entries reordering
  • [PathTracer] Disabled path-tracer when closing the viewport it's running in (otherwise it keeps running in the background + atmosphere preview is not restored) + grey out some options in viewport menu which are not currently supported with PT.
  • [MetaCloud] Fixed menu to add primitives to MetaCloud when it is selected or when several spheres are selected
  • [Material Editor] Fixed top part moving when changing material sublayer
  • Fixed the reading of old Standard Terrain with references which end-up completely flat.
  • Added image name when finding missing texture
  • Disabled transparency on splash screen on mac plugins (was not working)
  • Fixed dem import dialog
  • Hide last render when maximizing windows
  • [UI] Account for "interactive slider changes" user setting in "dual" & "ring" sliders behavior
  • Fixed editing of content in scenes made when shipped content was in install dir (eg. plants in "Room Radiosity" example scene)
  • Fixed the display of small pictures in the image browser (There was a mosaic effect / black grid)
  • Fixed the display of CSG objects inside groups (they remained in wireframe mode after editing them)
  • Fixed the display of eco instances as boxes with the "Fixed pipeline" OpenGL engine
  • Fixed the inability to reduce the display quality of specimens with the "Fixed pipeline" OpenGL engine.
  • Added a scroll bar for the list of lights for relighting settings.
  • Prevented the user to accidentally overwrite the default eco brush tools with the save button
  • Removed obsolete option "Optimize volumetric lights"
  • Fixed reaction when editing "Force extension" numerical edit control.
  • Some fixes about maximized dialog reopening on wrong screen.
  • [NEW] Improved gamma management by creating new Natural Film Response filters (and improved auto-exposure)
  • [NEW] Ask how to update gamma for old scenes: Convert using new settings or Apply a gamma tweak.
  • [NEW] Automatic conversion of old scene proposed during loading
  • Fixed the display of colors in OpenGL views (with the shader 4 mode) for materials only showing a constant color (without texture). The gamma was applied twice which produced colors that were too bright and washed-out/desaturated.
  • Correct gamma of render as OpenGL
  • Export C4D color constants using the gamma output value
  • Fixed default Albedo scale for all default Photometric Atmospheres
  • Fixed current camera exposure filter override when saving atmosphere
  • Fixed exposure not restored on atmosphere cancel
  • Properly take IES profiles during photon mapping. Also take light transform into account once IES direction has been sampled.
  • Fixed point & spot lights radiosity power in photometric mode.
  • Fixed radiosity intensity in photometric mode and apply the same irradiance logarithmic filtering as in standard mode.
  • Fixed missing reflective caustics generated by refractive objects.
  • Fixed missing caustics when global caustics photon count becomes very large.
  • Fixed Multipass output of signed data to unsigned formats
  • Fixed too bright Depth Multipass.
  • Fixed black parts on some Multipass channels and Relighting buffers in case of Stereo Rendering (for sky or very distant objects).
  • Fixed a bug in the Volumetric Material Editor: the cloud scaling was set to 0 after moving the altitude variation to 0.
  • [NEW] [Import & Export] Switched to Alembic 1.7.10.
  • [NEW] SkinVue fixed and Added to VUE (for legacy compatibility only)
  • Better error reporting during application startup
  • Fixed wrong warning regarding GoZ and other plug-ins version mismatch.
  • Added saving of 10 missing render quality settings (for .urs files and stacked renders)
  • Display only custom note when opening options for 16 bits grayscale PNG (aka Terrain Heightmap).
  • Fixed saving of instances modifications with the fast save system.
  • Fixed version stored in macros which could lead to macro execution glitches.

 

PlantFactory

  • [NEW] Added Interactive Path Traced preview (ideal to monitor PBR shader authoring for instance)
  • [NEW] Enhanced the "top transition" blending function of segments by extrapolating the parent shape
  • [NEW] Improved exported material names
  • [NEW] Added "Single Texture Per Material" baked export mode
  • [NEW] Improved texture baking
  • [NEW] Added running color algorithm, fixing seams for low mips.
  • Fixed meshing of flower node for mixed quad/triangle mode
  • Fixed export as obj for some corner cases
  • Fixed export as fbx for some corner cases
  • [NEW] Enhance preview contrast by reducing GI contribution by half
  • [NEW] Add filter 2D new points using the last clicked point and always find a place to add them (even when far away of the curve)
  • [NEW] Zoom where the mouse is in graph view, handle slowdown key, allows smaller zoom.
  • [NEW] Reworked UDIM export to sort by material
  • [NEW] Improved filter editor interface
  • [NEW] Added invert front and back option in flower node
  • [NEW] Fixed polygons count when using Auto LOD (show the count for the actual LOD)
  • [NEW] Added the ability to close the flower top
  • Fix material editor type control (basic vs advanced).
  • Fixed deletion of multiple points in filter 2D (and always keep at least one point)
  • Corrected interaction objects behavior (import/delete/undo/redo)
  • Fixed texture subfolder option not working for baked maps
  • Improved deletion behavior in preview
  • Minor changes to Generic Export Mesh dialog UI
  • Fixed cap displacement image update (rotate / mirror)
  • Fixed cap displacement when using inherited material
  • [NEW] Extracted sub parameters
  • [NEW] Parameter groups
  • [NEW] Handle 4-double parameters
  • [NEW] Display component labels for 2-int and 2-float parameters when any (X/Y remain by default)
  • Fixed select box parameter
  • Hide channel toggle parameters
  • Fixed picker values for color parameters
  • [NEW] Improved gamma management
  • Export C4D color constants using the gamma output value
  • Correct gamma of render as OpenGL
  • Fix some random application crash
  • Fixed potential crash at node creation in graph
  • Avoided crash on exit when dealing with application error
  • Better error reporting during application startup

 


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