Hello everyone!
It's been almost a year since I've updated the release branch of SculptrVR. But as many of you know, I've had regular updates to the beta branch during that whole time.
This update is HUGE. There are tons of performance improvements motivated by porting to Oculus Quest and PSVR, and well as a few new tools and other improvements. I think it's really great and I hope you all enjoy!
If you encounter any bugs or just want to stop by and say hello, please join the Discord community here:
https://discord.gg/qEX5ZKG
<3
-Nathan
Performance Improvements:
- Overall mesh generation has been sped up by 50%
- Memory usage is down more than 50% and some memory leaks have been fixed
- File sizes are down by almost 50% (They were already so small though!)
- General sculpting actions are ~25% faster
- Exporting meshes is now 3x faster, and uses 30% less memory
New Stuff:
- Procedurally generated landscapes
- New tool: Sword tool. Place ribbons and slice sword cuts through objects https://imgur.com/UCuOToh
- New tool: Snapping Cubey box tool. Place voxel-exact cubes in cubey rendering mode, or place sharp-edged cubes in smooth mode https://imgur.com/43ot3ja
- Snap Mode: Pop into snap mode for geometric creation
- Reference images can be opened up in game to help create
Major Improvements:
- Explore mode is now accessed through a tab on your front hand
- Meshes are cleaner with fewer lumpy triangles jutting outward
- Better physics with particles ignoring invisible blocks and hands grabbing onto triangle-exact geometry during climbing
- Show more detail with fewer frame drops thanks to better sculpture management
- Ability to mirror your stamp brush, and stamps now work with mirror planes
Other improvements and Bug Fixes:
- Ability to delete sculptures from within SculptrVR
- Ability to push up visible detail even higher in graphics settings
- Better layer highlighting while selecting layers in the panel
- Fix error in OBJ/FBX export when one layer is empty
- Shrink layer button pushes detail into a deeper layer and kills off any detail at the deepest level
- Paste brush has a snap mode
- Fix import CSV files and add ability to place spheres with a CSV
- Updated to Unreal Engine 4.21 from UE4.19. This incidentally speeds up meshing by 5% due to using a new more efficient vertex format.
- Glowing material slightly flickers to give it a more glowy quality
- Fix bug where deleting layers would cause incorrect layer attachment when reloading
- Fix a bug causing previews pedestals to be lower res
- Get update messages when uploading or downloading levels in multiplayer and from the content server
- Smoothing brush has a 3rd mode to smooth shape, but not colors
- Fix a horrible memory leak
- Optimize loading from disk and speed it up by 40%
- Fix ugly artifacts on the tube brush by biasing its detail up a bit
- Fix a surprisingly large number of crashes throughout the codebase
- Added a Triangle-exact intersection method that is used to make climbing in smooth mode way less shitty
- Improved vertex placement in mesh generation to show fewer voxel grid sampling artifacts
- Fix bug raycasting into multiple sculptures grabbing the wrong sculpture’s color
- Better error messages throughout the game, but especially for online/multiplayer stuff
- Add a file size estimate on the back of your menu hand
- Added an eye dropper hotkey on the color palette since most users didn’t realize you could eye drop whenever you open up the 3D color picker
- Skygrabber now pulls the sun/moon toward the location you are pointing
- New players tab in multiplayer allows you to match scale and rotation with other players. Host can also kick players
- Add reference images so you can see images in game while sculpting
- Added jump by 10 page buttons in the online gallery
- Input handling refactor reduces game thread time by 10%. Saving the world one joule of electricity at a time.
- Decreased total install size of SculptrVR from 1.2gb to 1.0gb (it’s 70% debug files, so maybe someday I can give up on crash reports and reduce it further to 300mb)
- Fix camera screenshot on Oculus Rift so it no longers submerges the player in the floor
- See your scale when zooming in and out
- Fix up all the audio in the app to have more uniform loudness, and spatialization
- Fix bulge/deflate tool appearance when it’s very small
- Fix position of the selection square on your tools menu at game start
- Fix crazy frame drops that occurred while downloading a level from the server in multiplayer
- Fix a bug where exported vertex normals would point in incorrect directions in rotated sculptures