Release Notes
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Golaem Crowd 1.4 (2012/03/15)
New Features
- Mental Ray procedural plugin
- RendermanStudioForMaya procedural plugin
- CrowdField: Instance Entities - entities (far from the pov) can be now declared as instances (not simulated, just generated at render time from an animated fbx file) - allows handling thousand of entities with amazing performances
- PopulationTool: added generation on mesh (can be dynamic)
- AvoidanceTargetLocator: new scatter attribute
- AvoidanceField: new boldness attribute
- AvoidanceField: new personal Space Radius attribute
- AvoidanceField: new onTargetReached enum attribute to control what to do when a target is reached (stop, pick next target, pick random target), valid for mode random target and target pool
- AvoidanceField: new target mode - targetIdPP to affect manually a target to each particle
- GeometryGroup: an AssetManager Character can now have several character geometries - this can be used to animate geometry which is not taken into account by the animation engine
Improvements
- SimulationTool: Python binding for the tool
- SimulationTool: Interface & menus improvement
- PopulationTool: huge performance improvement - particle generation is now a MpxCommand (instead of a MEL command) = 200k particles in 8sec
- Asset Manager: repartition weight in an Asset Group of a rendering type can be set to 50
- Asset Manager: CAM file path is displayed in the status bar
- AvoidanceField: new EntityHeight attribute (useful for not-in-cms scenes)
Bug fixes
- PopulationTool: fixed noise for point & quad tools
- PopulationTool: fixed transparency issues in locator display
- PopulationTool: fixed multipoints tool
- PopulationTool: fixed nParticles generation
- Skeleton Motion Converter: fixed Qt window crash with Linux
- CrowdField: fixed 0-lifespan particles
- CrowdField: motion cache is now cleared between two simulations
- Simulation Tool: fixed start & end frames for export
- Simulation Tool: fixed crash when exporting in empty directory
- BehaviorNode: fixed context menu for BehaviorNode creation
- VRay: handle special characters in node, scene & shader names
Golaem Crowd 1.3.1
Improvements
- Skeleton Motion Converter: Handles several bones with the same names but can not export it (regular behavior)
- Skeleton Motion Converter: Uniform method to export motion (independant from the skeleton type)
- Population Tool: Better noise for all shapes
Bug fixes
- Skeleton Motion Converter: Now takes rotateAxis values into account
- Skeleton Motion Converter: Now handles children joints as character skeleton root nodes
- Skeleton Motion Converter: Fix motion preview sometimes incorrect
- Population Tool: Fix a few bugs like the columns and rows count, the polygon shape "U problem"
- Renderman Plugin: Fixed an incorrect shader parameter bug
Golaem Crowd 1.3 (2011/11/07)
New Features
- CrowdField: a mesh (animated or not) can be added as a ground support in addition to the navMesh
- IK Behavior: New behavior to add a kinematic constraint on a body chain (arms, legs)
- LookAt Behavior: New behavior to make a character look at a specific position
Improvements
- New icons for Golaem Crowd object in the Hypergraph & the Outliner
- RenderMan, 3Delight & RenderManCompliant plugins: huge memory optimization
- Simulation Tool: FBX export now has 3 modes that are easier to understand
- Asset Manager: added the ability to rename, duplicate, drag&drop items
- Asset Manager: the same mesh can now be used more than one mesh asset
- CrowdField: locomotion is better computed in stairs
Bug fixes
- Renderer plugins: fixed a bug that causes a crash when using motion blur when the motion blur window is not an integer
- Asset Manager: fixed a bug that prevented adding an empty asset from Maya
- AvoidanceField: fixed a bug when skipping avoidance update
- Simulation Tool: FBX & renderer export: an error message is displayed in the script editor when no asset management file has been saved
- Simulation Tool: FBX & renderer export: the user is prompted to save the assets management window
- Simulation Tool: FBX & renderer export: fixed a crash when using a rendering type with a group having no asset
- Fixed multi-platform file paths compatibility
- Entity Surface Shape: fixed some OpenGl flags causing Maya crashes in some cases
- Entity Surface Shape: fixed wireframe issues
- CrowdField: fixed a bug that made people fly when walking upon obstacles
Golaem Crowd 1.2 (2011/09/07)
New Features
- Added Support for V-Ray Rendering Engine
- Added user scripts mel file: glmUserScripts.mel. Users can add their own scripts in this file. It's loaded at plugin load.
- Assets Manager: shader associations can be reseted to the mesh materials from Tools->Reset Shaders
- Assets Manager: added toolbars and buttons
- Assets Manager: added pop up menu to add a expand/collapse options
- AvoidanceField: distance to target can be exported to a PP attribute
- AvoidanceField: target id (crowd entity id) can be exported to a PP attribute (when the target is a particle system)
- AvoidanceField: a PP attribute can be used to skip entity update (Advanced tab)
- AvoidanceField: "lifespanPP" is used to skip "dead" particles when targeting a particle system
- AvoidanceField: comfort speed can be changed at runtime with the entity speed pp attribute
- AvoidanceTargetLocator: Add hierarchy of AvoidanceTargetLocator to be used as waypoints to define a navigation route
- CrowdField: user can choose which ground adaptation mode is used
- Motion Behavior: user can set a replay speed on the motion
- Motion Behavior: if use as loco is not checked, pick a random motion from the list
- Motion Locator: local translation is taken into account when playing a motion
- New glmCrowdFieldInfo command: infos on the Crowd Field. For now, it returns the particle of an entity or the entity Id of a particle
- New locator for Crowd Fields (CrowdEntitySurfaceShape) - it is now possible to assign a material and modify the bone width appearance
- New particle-related MEL functions for triggers
- Population Tool: added a "Look At" target orientations
- Population Tool: added generation on object pivot
- Population Tool: added generation on convex hull
- Simulation Tool: new "Use Existing Simulation Cache" option - Only exports the simulation without running it if a simulation cache exists
- TriggerNode: a custom MEL command can be run on success
Improvements
- Crowd behaviors (motion & IK head) are no longer deleted when connected nodes are deleted
- CrowdField: Use Motion As Field PP - Per particle attribute that enables the use of behavior motions to move the particles (replaces useBehaviorsAsField)
- CrowdField: Add feature to export multi crowdFields in a single pass of simulation
- Population Tool: generated geometry now shows correctly on the associated navMesh, bounding box is correctly set (was not scaling z against ratio)
- Simulation Cache format is now pdb32.gz (Disney Partio) - better performance and smaller particle files
Bug Fixes
- Assets Tool: assets are no longer lost when saving the scene under a different name
- Assets Tool: fixed a bug that prevents adding an empty mesh asset to a group when all meshes have been used
- Assets Tool: removed error message "Failed to open asset management file ''. The file does not exist!" when there is no assets file.
- Crowd Behavior: trigger now works when "Use As Loco" is activated
- Crowd IO: fixed a crash when the motion skeleton is different from the FBX skeleton
- Crowd IO: fixed a scaling bug when FBX root bone has a local scale
- Crowd IO: fixed a FBX skinning bug with meshes that are attached to joints with no deformation
- Crowd IO: fixed a bug with incorrect normals
- Crowd IO: fixed a bounding box computation bug
- Crowd RenderMan plugin & RenderMan compliant plugin: fixed coordinate system (right handed instead of default left handed)
- Crowd RenderMan plugin & RenderMan compliant plugin: fixed normals
- Motion Locator: fixed a root orientation bug that could affect some characters (final fix)
- Population Tool: fixed a crash when replacing a particleShape with renamed shape
- SkeletonMotion Converter: changed the way bones are scaled to support more characters
- SkeletonMotion Converter: now handle negative Maya frames
- Simulation Tool: fixed a crash when an entity type is associated to an invalid rendering type
Golaem Crowd 1.1 (2011/06/16)
New features
- SkeletonMotion Converter: Added a 2D previzualisation of skeleton when choosing detection mode
- SkeletonMotion Converter: Added visualization help and tooltip for mapping
- SkeletonMotion Converter: Added 2D previzualisation of the motion before exporting it
- NavMesh is now automatically mapped in most cases, otherwise accessible by a dropdown menu
- New MEL command: spatialRequestMELCommand (count entities in a given zone)
- Added an ExternalEntityLocator: permits to use an external object as an obstacle in the avoidance field
- Population Tool: Added a triangle shape
- Population Tool: Added a "quincux" mode
- Population Tool: Added a "replace particle shape" mode
- Behavior Node: Splitted into Behavior and TriggerNode (old files are no more compatibles, sorry for the inconvenience)
- Behavior Node: Added a loop option to the behavior (reevaluate a starting trigger after being stopped)
- Behavior Node: Automatically create 2 linked TriggerNode (start/stop). Customizable via Tool Setting
- Trigger Node: Triggers can be chained using AND/OR operator
- Trigger Node: Trigger can aggregate other triggers
- Trigger Node: One trigger can be shared between multiple BehaviorNode
- Trigger Node: Added a "zone" trigger type
- Trigger Node: drivenAttribute changed from "triggerAttribute" to "drivenAttribute"
- Assets Tool: Shader templates can be exported/imported
- Assets Tool: Shader Assets can use custom int/float shader attributes which are passed to the RenderMan plugin
- Better skeleton mapping interface
- RenderMan plugin uses surface shaders & texture coordinates with multiple diffuse materials
- 3Delight render plugin
- Renderman compliant plugin (.exe)
- Updated to support FBX SDK 2012
Improvements
- SkeletonMotion Converter: Window can be fully resized
- NavMesh Creator: Automatically add a navmesh locator after a succesful generation of navMesh (configured with the generated .gse)
- NavMesh Creator: Default maximum horizontal slope value has been set to 45° for better navMesh results
- NavMeshCreator: when the input geometry is not triangulated, the error message explains how to triangulate it within Maya.
- NavMeshCreator: construction history is now ignored
- Avoidance Field: random targets are now placed only in accessible zones
- Avoidance Field: characters keep on going to other target when reached random targets
- Avoidance Field: when using random targets entities keep moving between different targets
- Avoidance Field and crowdField now init at frame 1 instead of frame 2.
- Avoidance Field now handles directionPP attribute at initialization
- Population Tool: Added a "Emit Selected" command to enable emitting several PopulationTool at once
- Population Tool: Added ProgressBar (appears only if population time is more than 0.8s)
- CrowdField: removed warning when no directionPP/velocityPP is set on crowdField
- Assets Tool: Asset Tool is less annoying when the .cam was never saved
- Assets Tool: exports the meshes in the character and its skeleton without having to select them in maya
- Assets Tool: the caa file now only contains entity - renderingType associations
- Assets Tool: mesh distribution is done when exporting FBX/RIB and in the renderer plugins
- Assets Tool: shader data is computed in the renderer plugins
- Assets Tool: shader assets can be assigned to multiple meshes at the same time
- Assets Tool: Maya and FBX buttons are now unified
- Assets Tool: Meshes can be viewed in Maya when selected in the Assets tab (using Ctrl key)
- Assets Tool: meshes with the same name (but different paths) are now supported
- Assets Tool: rendering Types can be unassigned from entity types by removing them from the "Assign..." list
- Assets Tool: Individual meshes can now be added / removed from a mesh asset; the +/- buttons have
- shortcuts ([Numpad+]/[Del])
- Assets Tool: Added a character sample in tutorial resources
- Simulation Tool - FBX Export: materials are not duplicated anymore when all the characters are exported into the same FBX scene.
- Simulation Tool: changed the way errors are reported
- Simulation Cache Editor: a user defined output directory can now be used to export the edited cache
- All custom widgets have the locale English-United States: double spinboxes use . (dot) instead of , (comma)
Bug fixes
- SkeletonMotion Converter: fixed skeleton description export when bones are absent from the bindpose (which resulted in huge bones in the crowdfield locator)
- SkeletonMotion Converter: fixed a crash when joints have children that are not joints on a skeleton in Maya
- Fixed a bug when skeleton root != motion root
- Motion Locator: could not replay the motion on some specific characters
- Motion Locator: corrected a minor bug: the scale was not taken into account to apply the motion's translation
- Motion Locator: fixed a root orientation bug that could affect some characters
- NavMesh Creator: when selecting a transform node, all child meshes are properly added to the nav mesh computation
- NavMesh Creator: better error management
- Avoidance Field: fixed a bug where the result of the first simulation was different from the subsequent ones
- CrowdField: No more artefact crowd Entities are displayed when reseting a scene.
- CrowdField: More robust when touching the NavMeshFile.
- EntityType: multiple mapping of behavior nodes is now working
- Assets Tool: fixed a bug when saving the fbx character without giving the .fbx extension to its name
- Assets Tool: fixed a bug that caused changes to be lost when minimizing and restoring Maya
- Assets tool: Fixed a bug when saving the fbx character without giving the .fbx extension to its name
- Assets Tool: Fixed a bug that caused changes to be lost when minimizing and restoring Maya
- Simulation Tool: fixed crash on Simulation Protobuf export when selecting all attributes.
- Simulation Tool: Fixed pbz export bug when using entities with different bones count
- Fixed a bug where some characters are not exported correctly in FBX
- Fixed a bug that could crash Crowd on some FBX files
- Various bugfixes for linux version