User Guide > Whats New

More New Features


Interface

• Handle editors for persistent and operator type handles
• Dynamic Parameters

• Parameter update feedback

• New Tumble/Pan options
• Custom panels can be controlled externall
Pivot point handle workflow


Digital Assets

• Scripted subnet support for render operators and channel operators
• Detail attributes now visible in spreadsheet


Modeling

• Line SOP
• Null SOP
• Partition SOP
• Attribute Promote SOP
• Point connectivity information in vex sops
 


Animation

• Channel Group list pane
• Autoscoping of channels when they are selected or keyed

• Next key/previous key buttons on playbar

• MMB drag on playbar to hold parameter values
• Single key channel support

• Zero out and smooth slopes (Ctrl-RMB) to avoid overshoot
• Cycle function - repeats with an offset
• Frame selected keys in both directions in channel editor

• Quaternion support through qlinear function
• Channel reading and writing


Characters

• Kinematic override - interactive manipulation of rest angles


Lighting

• Active radius parameter - provides illumination boundary
• Output drivers have parameters to choose active lights in the scene
• Point instancing of light sources.


Rendering

• Mantra procedural support
       - Polygonal metaball support
       - Object type support
       - Particle sprites
       - 3D Texture direct rendering
• Polygonal Metaball support
• Mantra Object Type support
• Render enhancements for Particle sprites
• Output of named transform spaces to RIB and IFD. All null objects in the scene are now output as named transform spaces. These spaces can be accessed in shaders.
• Point instancing shader overrides. By applying shaders to points, the instanced geometry now inherits the point shader. This allows different shaders to be applied to different instances. The same technique may be used for both geometry
instancing and light instancing.
• Ray-bounce has been split into two parameters to give separate control for reflections/refractions.
• proto_install has support for the Sun GridEngine (distributed rendering).
• RenderMan enhancements (deep shadow support)


Image Formats

• TIFF Files set first scanline at the top of the image for better Photoshop support.
• RADIANCE high dynamic range (HDR) file format support. [no alpha]
• isixpack (Reflection Map Generator) can use light probe images (http://www.debevec.org/Probes/)


Compositing

• New Operator types:
       - Channel Copy
       - Color Replace
       - Colorwheel Generator
       - Convolve
       - Field Swap
       - Grain Creation
       - Invert
       - Median
• Rotospline enhancements including feathering
• XOR and screen added to composite/layer cops
• Motion blur added to transform, scale, and composite/layer cops
• Concatenation of multiple sequential transforms to transform, scale, and composi0te/layer cops
• Drag-and-drop support
• Image view rulers


Particle Tools

• Final Behaviour and minimum impulse added to collision pop for bounces
• Quaternion support in expressions and vex


Other

• VEX enhancements -- Please see online release notes
• hscript enhancements
     - The atjob allows periodic commands to be run
     - The hscript application now supports the openport (and thus Java), tcl/tk and atjob commands.