… but I would have hoped for some viewport improvements….

OneBigTree
… but I would have hoped for some viewport improvements….

???

there are some updates:
https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3138&Itemid=422#ui [sidefx.com]

mandrake0

OneBigTree
… but I would have hoped for some viewport improvements….

???

there are some updates:
https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3138&Itemid=422#ui [sidefx.com]

Yes, and none of it improves the viewport.
Still no automatic cusping (aka anglebased normals) for the viewport, High end lighting looks like, well not so highend… (see screenshot)
Note the dark cube, it gets dark when you orbit around it as if it moves out of the light cone.
The splitview still has fixed dividers, and so on….

There's quite a few improvements in the viewport in H15.

• Shading modes improved (oren-nayar diffuse, various specular - GGX, phong, blinn), with energy conservation and fresnel blending.
  
• Improved shaders to match the material gallery
  
• Better normal map support (world and tangent) and Roughness map support
  
• Specular, emission, diffuse and bump maps were already supported in H14, but better represented by our materials now
  
• Onion skinning
  
• Much faster drawing and processing of bones & nulls for character animation
  
• Hair shading
  
• Environment map support for environment lights in normal quality lighting
  
  It's not mentioned quite as prominently as some of the other H15 features, simply because it's in a supporting role for those features.

Yes that doesn't help if the lighting doesn't work.

Still no automatic cusping (aka anglebased normals) for the viewport

This will not happen until mantra does this as well. It'd be too confusing to have it look right in the viewport, and wrong in the render.

twod

Still no automatic cusping (aka anglebased normals) for the viewport

This will not happen until mantra does this as well. It'd be too confusing to have it look right in the viewport, and wrong in the render.

LOL
It was mentioned they were working on it for 14 but it didn't make it so I was hoping…

Here are all the new materials with their default values. There are two guys in the very back that have the toon shaders on them (you can see their legs), but they didn't render

There are two guys in the very back that have the toon shaders on them (you can see their legs), but they didn't render

Are you sure you did it correctly? You need to have 2 copies of the mesh in the same position, one gets the Toon Outline (that's what you applied to those guys probably) the other the Toon Surface or any other shader.

What the Toon outline does it displace the mesh according to certain parameters and render only the back side of it. So you get a silhouette of everything.

For the same reason the current Toon Outline implementation is only very limited when you need interior lines, because those can't really be created with that method.

Ah cool…no I did not do that! I just dragged/dropped the materials on to the dolls and that was it. Thank you.