Hey,
we would like to show you some of the cool new things that are coming to cables with this massive update.
The last update of cables happened at the end of July (30.07.2020 to be precise) and a lot of stuff has happened. We managed to close 229 "issues" spanning bugfixes, improvements and new features.
Even though the focus of this update was more on bugfixing and "cleanup" we managed to push out a few new ops and features for you, some of which we'd like to quickly introduce:
More tools for Mesh Instancer
These Ops give you some easy ways to manipulate your instanced meshes without re-uploading everything to the GPU every frame.
Vertex shaders will do the work for you and you can control them using textures.
You can modify positioning of the meshes using InstancedDisplacementMap and colorize them using InstancedTextureColorize.
This can then be combined with any material and other shaderEffects.
New export options
We are often asked how putting cables patches on your own website works and sometimes we cannot help because every web-hoster does stuff differently.
We are trying to make this process a bit easier by allowing owners of patches to connect
their individual patches to their github pages or to netlify by providing an API-Key in the
cables ui.
This will then give owners and collaborators of patches a "one click deployment" to these pages and should give you an easy way to show your creations to the world...
Please feel free to suggest other services in the forum!
JSON structure view
When working with bigger datasets, netsted JSON or remote APIs finding the datapoints that really matter to you used to be really tedious, spreading over several ops, up until now.
This update introduces a few ops that let you select properties of a JSON-Object "by path".
But more important, we put a little "explorer" in there to find the correct ops. Working with deeply nested JSON should now be a lot easier, sometimes even just two or three clicks to get to what you want.
Canvas magnifier
Introducing a new handy little tool to check colors of your rendering.
Press ctrl+c / cmd+c to copy the selected color to the clipboard!
Transparency workflow
We updated the ImageCompose and DrawImage ops to finally support transparency the way you would expect it.
Expect more tools to work and modify transparent textures in the future.
Some texture effects will not respect the transparency. We are working on this, please let us know if you find those bugs.
Also worth mentioning:
- Many Improvements to MatCapMaterial and PhongMaterial
- First round of improvements to existing audio ops
- Tweaks and fixes to the raycasting system
- Improved profiling of ops
- First round of improvements to existing audio ops
- Tweaks and fixes to the raycasting system
- Improved profiling of ops
You can see all the changes of this update in our changelog.
That being said, a huge thank you goes out to everyone contributing to this update, either by code, by reporting bugs or asking for improvements and by helping each others on the forum and on discord, keep up the commumity!
People contributing to this release are (in no particular order):
That's all folks! Enjoy all the new stuff, and: happy patching!
All the best from,
your undev team