JangaFX Releases EmberGen 1.0

Below are some of EmberGen 1.0's new features:

Simulation

• A completely reworked particle system
• Implemented cubic and linear advection methods
• Improved the simulation grid and pressure solver which results in better movement, better visuals, and fewer artifacts
• Added a “Trace path” feature for sphere shapes that will fill in the gaps when moving quickly
• Fuel and Temperature channels are always Linear interpolation
• Advection performance optimizations, particularly improving Upscaling simulation performance
• Improved and renamed diffusion parameters for optimization and ease-of-use
• Improved performance while the simulation is paused which means it should be much easier to work on very heavy sims
• There is now an explicit Physics weight parameter to determine if the particles are affected by the fluid simulation or the particles' physics
• Mass determines how strongly gravity will affect particles
• New Spiral and Hemisphere shapes added to Shapes:primitives
• Particles can be emitted frozen - collisions of mask shapes overlap releases them

Rendering

• GPU memory optimizations, saving approximately 1.6 GB per 100 million voxels, which corresponds to approximately 29% more non-upscaled voxels
• Added the ability to adjust camera clipping planes
• Added ‘Raymarch Sharpening’ in the Rendering tab of the Shading node
• Particles now render correctly in the full-frame when the resolution is over 720p
• Removed advected noise from Volume post-processing
• Fixed a rendering bug where vectors are visually truncated for viewport sizes bigger than 1080p

Gizmos and Visualizers

• Replaced old bounding box with wireframe
• Vector fields can now be displayed correctly even without simulation running
• The simulation node now previews volumetric velocity instead of input force
• Lines are now rendered as line arrows for clarity
• Improved bounding box rendering for clarity
• Improved visualization of shapes, forces, falloff regions, and wireframes
• Added vector force gizmos and manipulators for the Vector Field and Noise Force nodes
• Added support for the velocity vector visualization for all force types
• Made the force visualization respect the force shape masks, which can be used to easily see which parts of the force are covered by the shape

Importing Overhaul

• Multiple animations
• Combinations of mixed animations (rigid, vertex, skinning, and morphs)
• Per animation framerates and durations
• Multiple imports (up to 4 influencing the sim), no hard cap on the graph or outside the sim
• Masks include meshes/bones and vertex colors
• Ability to easily reimport
• Temporarily dropped support for OBJ imports
• Unable to disable rendering of individual masks or vertex colors
• Removed volumetric rendering for meshes

Exporting Overhaul

• Improved the performance and memory usage in many areas of exporting
• Velocity upscaling has been removed from VDB exports
• Changed alpha exports to render to white instead of black
• Added the ability to remap values when exporting as VDB
• Added the ability to set the VDB grid class during export
• Added the ability to export multilayer EXR images
• Added a new image export previewer with an independent scrubber and timeline for flipbooks and sequences
• Added the ability to export particles from the new particle manager to Alembic
• Normalized VDB output

Node Graph Rework

• Renamed the Volume node to Volume Processing
• Renamed the Emitter node to Emitter: Volume
• Renamed the Particle Emitter node to Emitter: Particles
• Removed the Particle Manager node and moved its contents to the Simulation node under the Particles tab
• Emitters, Colliders, and Forces inputs now provide those to the Particles via the Simulation node
• Colliders and Forces now have a Mode parameter to change between volume, particles, or both
• The Scene node gained a Particles input which must be used in order to render the particles to the viewport
• The Export: Particles node now takes a Particles input instead of an Export input
• The new render node replaces the old render node and export image node
• You can now create multiple render nodes for more control of exporting

User Interface

• New Welcome Screen to help you get oriented when opening the software, with easy access to presets, tutorials, and more!
• New range sliders to make a few parameters much more user friendly
• Greatly improved ground visuals
• Improved performance of the preview scrubber
• The default viewport quality has been changed to “Low” to improve default performance
• Removed the need for a particle pool and added the particle count to the viewport statistics
• Added RGBA buttons in the render and export tabs for visualization of different channels
• Added $(date) variable support for filenames
• Added support for resizing comment boxes from all corners
• Reduced distance for two keyframes to be considered one when changing values via autokeying
• Changed timeline override warning not to display if the lane only has one key on it
• Added hotkeys for export preview’s transport controls
• Improved highlighting of currently-selected-item on graph’s add-node menu
• Improved folder selector dialog