Greetings,
* beta release 2.1 ready for your enjoyment.
There's now a number of changes in the clusterThis mantra DSO (major surgery underway) that has made some serious improvements in performance and capability, many of which I had relied on CVEX in the past but that became cumbersome with the ever changing number of parameters/attributes (and thus arrays) needed to pass to the CVEX/VEX code with each project. I have a scheme that will make the interface to the CVEX feature more flexible, but I really wanted to introduce some new ideas and features as well as fold in some stuff from other projects (and that are now beyond the reach of an NDA agreement).
The most exciting thing added to the project is the use of Open VDB libraries and tools (
http://www.openvdb.org/) [
openvdb.org] for various processing of the data, modulating attributes (velocity and normal vectors right now, much more to come) and geometry position/scale/etc. In it's current implementation, there's access to Open VDB's filtering and most of control over how the data is created and used. AS such, you'll need to have the Open VDB libraries on your system (they are included in the distribution archive).
New features:
* radius point attribute - if this attribute is present in the incoming point cloud, it will be used instead of the global radius parameter in the GUI
* vdb_radius point attribute - a required attribute to set the radius of the rasterization by the Open VDB ParticleToLevelSet() function.
* Open VDB for preprocessing and post-processing of the geometry. The interface uses the same parameters as in the DW_OpenVDBFromParticles SOP. In addition there are controls to apply the influence of the volume data for position, velocity, and normals. The filter switches are there an initial implementation but will soon have similar controls as the DW_OpenVDBLevelSetFilter SOP.
* Per point geometry file instancing. Temporarily disabled until we create a geo queue/cache, there's way too much disk thrashing with instance counts are high.
* Added mersenne twister noise. Someone requested in the past, but it doesn't seem to different than the alligator noise already implemented.
Compiled for Linux (64 bit), example files and documentation:
http://www.digitalcinemaarts.com/software/clusterthis/ [
digitalcinemaarts.com]
On Git Hub:
https://github.com/digital-cinema-arts/clusterThis/tree/REL2.1 [
github.com]
The end of the month milestone is to get to release 2.5 with all the new features fully implemented, tested and with examples. Video tutorials are next as some of this can be a bit complex to setup and get running, plus there's tips about things to avoid. Time permitting we'll have a handful of QT movies with various applications in real production scenarios.
Take care,
Mark
