Added Gaea Tor Processor plugin for Quadspinner's Gaea Terrain Software. For it to work you need Gaea Installed, and have a valid license. You can set up a graph of any scale in Gaea, with appropriate input/output points, expose parameters that you need to modify from Houdini with the Tor Processor. Some convenient presets will follow shortly.
Straight Skeleton 3D allows you to generate curves from meshes, still have some more work on documenting and exposing extra controls if needed
Updates
Added a warning to RBD to FBX if a user feeds the tool packed geometry with invalid transforms on it. (Ex scale of 0) Also set the message node to promote errors & warnings to the top level.
Bug Fixes
Motion Vector ROP final image output respects atlas resolution parm for layouts that could cause fractions.
Texture Sheet ROP now handles a sequence starting on any frame number.
Deleted temp attributes on Disc Generator and made material paths optional.
MapBox node will now properly respect manual mode and the OSM tiles will be offset properly
Simple Baker would fail in some cases because an internal HDA was unlocked.
DDS File COP allows for .dds image files to be loaded into COPs
Updates
Vertex Animation Textures 2.0 released. Still some kinks to work out so please report any issues. You can find more info on the forum thread [www.sidefx.com].
Improved several UI elements on the Gaea node. Reload parm button placed in a more suitable location, added extra data parm for loops/pdg use, implemented preset system, added several more error checks.
Motion Vectors ROP now works with fire (simulations with heat instead of density fields).
Make Loop has a smooth transition when blending sequences.
Volume Texture ROP can now export frame ranges.
Added large amount of new demoscenes for FX tools
Refactored the Volume Texture ROP so that it's multithreaded.
Added InstantMeshes 2.0. This version no longer requires you to download an exe from Github. It works straight out of the box for Windows. Linux tbd. The tool now has the ability to optionally take in guide curves to control topology flow. Developed by Roahith Rajendiran
Bug Fixes
Vertex Animation Texture fluid export generates correct number of triangles on every frame.
Fixed an issue in Fire Presets demoscene
Impostor ROP render as single image option no longer greyed out for animations.
Fixed a caching bug in Gaea Tor Processor where no mask would be present in the calculation.
Fixed parm interface generation bug where some older parms would remain if you changed the .tor file
Correctly renamed Gaea plugin.
Motion Vector ROP final image output respects atlas resolution parm for layouts that could cause fractions.
Texture Sheet ROP now handles a sequence starting on any frame number.
PSD Trace now is multiparm based to allow for the extraction of multiple layers at once. Each extraction now also has a few more options. Including resample amount, Inline point removal threshold, expand/shrink layers.
MapsBaker now has curvature disabled by default, tracing mode default is now Surface Normal based, fixed issue with polysoup inputs.
Bug Fixes
Vertex Animation Textures had a discrepancy in the fluid export that could cause the pixels to be slightly offset.
Fixed an issue with baking against a highres with multiple materials could reorder the primitive ids and cause artefacts on the Maps Baker.
Impostor ROP when set to animation and one image was using XY Frames instead of animation frames parm.
Quadrangulate SOP will convert triangulated meshes back to their original Quad state. This is not a quad remesher and it only colapses long edges on triangulated primitives.
Procedural Smoke node will generate rolling smoke for background elements.
Added OBJ Loader. This tool allows you to load in an obj file including an mtl.
Updates
We've added a whole bunch of documentation!!!
Quadrangulate got a facelift and better algorithms with version 2.0
HDR support on the Substance Plugin
Vertex Animation Textures fluid export is more robust with varying target prim counts.
Fixed issue in Impostor Camera Rig
Updated internal Occlusion definition in AutoUV for ShortestPath algorithm. This might change your UVs a bit due to a different approach for solving occlusion. (More precise)
MapsBaker now bakes positionmap to be normalized by default. (Toggle under advanced tab allows you to disable this behavior). UDIM is now also a toggle that needs to be enabled in order to get UDIM bakes to work.
Reality Capture SOP Updated to latest SDK Version
The Mark Seams sop is now deprecated and therefore ophidden. Its functionality has been replaced in the Houdini 17.5 UV Flatten. The tool is however still accessible by opunhiding it.
Gamedev Group SOP Documentation
Small fix on the Substance Plugin.
Fixed Blurring bug in Flowmap Obstacle. The blurring now only gets applied to the newly generated obstacle, and not the flowmap as a whole.
UV Stacker is now deprecated. The same functionality can be replicated using UV-Layout in 17.5 or newer. The tool will no longer show up in the search function, but is still accessible through the opunhide command.
Updated the Edge Group to Curve SOP to not automatically cook when there's no valid group.
Adding more functionality to the Quadrangulate SOP with groups for protecting and deleting specific edges, ignoring boundary edges and ensuring a max number of edges.
MapsBaker now takes diffuse tint from the principledshader in consideration when baking.
Added a button in the file menu that opens the most recent crash file for the last opened file. Courtesy of @_baku89 on twitter.
Added Symmetrize. This tool allows you to very quickly make a model symmetrical using clip & mirror around an axis.
Added Distance From Border. This tool calculates the distance between every point and the nearest unshared edge. Very handy for creating organic-looking scatter masks.
Updates
Instant Meshes is now compiled against Linux as well
Straighten SOP can now export transform values to be restored later
Updating the OSM Import node to properly close multi polygon buildings
Color Gradient sop now allows for a gradient to be generated around a custom angle around Y aswell.
Bug Fixes
Vertex Animation Texture ROP now exports json data even when material export is turned off.
Vertex Animation Texture ROP now lists 8K target texture size as 8192
Fixing the case where the Quadrangulate SOP doesn't have any work to do
Hi folks! This is the very last update for the GameDev Tools. But fear not! You can continue to get your regular fix of updates from the SideFX Labs Updates [www.sidefx.com] thread. Head on over there and click on the subscribe button to continue receiving emails.