EmberGen 1.0 Release
EmberGen 1.0 is finally here! It’s packed with tons of new features and fixes, so buckle up. It’s gonna be a long list… You can grab the latest build from https://jangafx.com/try or if you already have a build installed, run embergen and it should prompt you to update.
EmberGen 1.0 Trailer: EmberGen 1.0 Release Trailer - YouTube
EmberGen 1.0 Live Stream: EmberGen 1.0 Launch Stream - We're out of beta! - YouTube
There were a few major overhauls since the last public release, and you’ll find more details in the list below, but here is a quick overview:
- The particle system was completely redone to pack in lots more functionality and improve performance
- We did a major rework of importing and exporting, in some cases writing our own libraries to help with certain file formats
- The node graph got a makeover with some renamed nodes and the addition of more nodes to make your lives easier
- It didn’t exactly get an overhaul, but there are so many huge improvements to the UI/UX that it deserves a mention here as well. The biggest change is the home screen and preset browser.
We hope you enjoy all the new bells and whistles and look forward to seeing all the amazing things you create with EmberGen 1.0
Enjoy!
Simulation
- Added our completely reworked particle system
- Implementated cubic and linear advection methods
- Improved the simulation grid and pressure solver which results in better movement, better visuals, and fewer artifacts
- Added “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 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
- Removed the Advection Method parameter and replaced it with the Velocity Advection Method and Voxel Advection Method parameters
- Removed Turbulence from Simulation Node
- Removed Flow from Simulation Node
- Fixed emitter velocity transfer which wasn’t working when blending shapes
- Fixed ‘Advect BFECC Velocity’ (explicitly disable to recover previous behavior)
- Fixed a bug causing mesh pivots to stop affecting transforms
- Fixed force noise not reverting to its original starting point
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 Rendering tab of the Shading node
- Particles now render correctly in the full-frame when 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
- 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 is covered by the shape
- Fixed rendering when multiple noise forces are visible
- Fixed the behavior of force gizmos when being transformed by another node
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
- Added FBX options for rendering various masks or disabling rendering of geometry altogether
- Added VDB transform from Import node
- FBX camera pins are now persisted such that links do not disappear when reimporting assets
- Fixed FBX non-animated cameras not inheriting transforms correctly
- Fixed the FBX bug where disconnecting the control pin of a camera changes its rotation
- Fixed an FBX bug with interpolating rotations
- Fixed FBX reverse animations with negative FPS
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 independent scrubber and timeline for flipbooks and sequences
- Added the ability to export particles from the new particle manager to Alembic
- Normalized VDB output
- Fixed a bug where certain FBX files from Blender would get stuck in an infinite loop
- Fixed some issues with coordinate system transforms in VDB exports so your volumes should line up in external tools
- Fixed the aspect ratio of export previews
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
- Added the $(projectdir) variable for exporting
- Added helpful text to the export tab when no export node is selected
- Renamed render node’s flipbook rows/columns => columns/rows
- Added several missing tooltips throughout the UI
- Added a historgram widget for temperature and color remapping
- Added the Mouse Compatibility Mode to Preferences to improve mouse controls when using remote desktop
- Headers are now highlighted when clicking on tabs in the node details window
- Added X, Y, and Z labels to oscillator curve previews
- Added arrow key selection to dropdown menus
- Added a color picker tool to the Color Picker window that can select colors on screen (click and hold, then drag your mouse to choose a color)
- Stopped reordering Capture Type dropdown list
- Added support for the Return key to submit dialog boxes
- Changed frame limiter default from 0 (unlimited) to 60
- Added animated thumbnails for project files
- Added controls for choosing which Render node is previewed in the Render tab
- Added the ability to drag-and-drop image files as backplates
- Added the ability to drag-and-drop files into text boxes
- Added the ability to drag-and-drop backplates and import node files onto the node graph
- Improved Wacom tablet support
- Added the range slider widget
- Added “Randomize All Seeds” button to the top of the node graph
- Changed Min/Max components on timeline to be labelled Min/Max instead of X/Y
- Added timeline bars for import nodes
- Added a “Master scale” parameter
- Added an “Auto pivot” button that puts the pivot at the center of the mesh
- Improved mouse handling when interacting with histograms
- Improved window resize handle hitbox
- Improved timeline styling
- Added ‘Auto Arrange’ to node graph
- Added preference for node graph’s background grid type
- Added UI for sim loop options to timeline’s loop button
- Added ‘Select All Keys’ to context menu of single component on timeline
- Changed component value widget on timeline to operate on selected values if any are selected (with the addition of multi-edit support)
- Changed timeline’s left/right hotkeys to only operate on visible keys
- Some capture types have been renamed and reorganized
- Added “Increment and save”
- This can be accessed from a hotkey and the file menu
- If the file name ends with a number the number should be incremented and the file saved
- If not, a number should be appended to the current filename when saved
- Toggled-off nodes are now styled to be grey to make it more obvious they are toggled-off
- Disabled nodes (eg. ones that exceed the maximum number allowed of that node when copied-and-pasted) have been restyled to have a red border
- If an export would result in files being overwritten a dialog box is displayed (this can be disabled/enabled in the preferences)
- Re-ordered add-node list by usage frequency, with siblings near one another
- Added “Export” button to top right of export node if only one is active
- Removed the “Tidy-up” feature in favour of the “auto-arrange” feature
- Fixed automatically clicking the dropdown menu if it spawned when the user’s mouse already was
- Fixed frames numberbox not working on key’s context menu
- Fixed timeline’s frame numberbox not setting when changed
- Fixed a bug where the window would get stuck in a resizing state
- Fixed a bug where max values could not be overridden in the timeline
- Fixed “Open Folder” button on export nodes to use strings interpolation
- Fixed not being able to link channels on render node when using “Smooth UI”
- Fixed parameter layouting on particle export node when no input was connected
- Fixed the default file extension for the save file dialog
- Fixed noise previews on node details panel to size with UI scaling
- Fixed a bug where loading a project would override the interpolation mode of curves
- Fixed inversion of horizontal touchpad scrolling
- Fixed issues with “Scale and center to fit”
- Fixed and improved color picker’s mouse hit detection
- Fixed “latching” on all mouse-draggable items which have a limit which can be overshot
- Fixed ‘Custom’ dropdown on image dimensions to avoid ellipses at non-100% scales
- Fixed ‘Set Bounds’ window not showing when triggered from timeline
- Fixed HSV text-input boxes on colorpicker
- Fixed a bug related to absolute frame numbers so now the sequence starts at the correct frame
- Fixed a bug where sixpoint parameters were unusable in the Render Settings tab
- Fixed layouting of capture preview’s menu bar
- Fixed duplicate six point settings on render node
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
Misc
- Added a Shape: Transform node that can be used to group and transform SDF shapes
- Files can now be specified in text boxes with an HTTP or HTTPS url (this will freeze EmberGen during the file download)
- Various performance and memory improvements for particles
- Added Shapes Mask input to the Point, Line, Noise, Toroidal, and Vector Field Force nodes
- Particles can now be emitted from all shapes
- Added the ability to use multiple shapes per particle emitter
- Normalized direction of wind speed in simulator
- Improved export preview scrubber performance
- Added the ADSR modulator node
- Added checking that export path is valid when exporting
- Fixed crash related to AMD drivers
- Fixed memory leak in license manager
- Fixed bug where opening recovery file and followed by saving would save to the recovery file which is then deleted
- Fixed rotation composition of shapes which was causing some bugs