News, Release note

PopcornFX v2.11 is released!

13 January 2022
PopcornFX v2.11 banner

The PopcornFX v2.11 build is now available!

Make sure you upgrade your runtime / plugins before switching to this version.
You can also check out the changelog on the wiki, where you’ll find all download links and updated patch nodes.


Note: UE4 & UE5 plugin archives are provided as 7z archives for better compression. They can be extracted using 7zip.

Highlights

 

 

Check out the PopcornFX 2.11 release highlights livestream, where a few members of the dev team dive into some of the new features:

Changelog 2.11.3

Builds (Mar 31st 2022)

  • All v2.9 LTS fixes: v2.9.21 & below
  • Fixed #9838: Rendering: crash when GPU simulated ribbons are rendered and draw calls slicing is enabled
  • Fixed #9779: in-viewport profiler displays nodes with 4B cycles execution time
  • Fixed #9727: Editor cannot extract packages that contained filenames with non-ascii characters
  • Fixed #9771: UnrealEngine: UE5 Preview 0 support
  • Fixed #9781: v2.11.0 core-upgrade generates outdated ‘FeatureDithering.h’ material file from the older preview-0 build

 

Changelog 2.11.2

Builds (Feb 24th 2022)

Downloads

Changelog

  • All v2.9 LTS fixes: v2.9.20 & below
  • Fixed #9404: Project Launcher: crash when clicking browse button to locate a banner when editing project settings
  • Fixed #9349: Project launcher: When downloading a new version, double-clicking on the “install and update” button launches two installers in parallel, which mess-up the install
  • Fixed #9350: Editor sign-up dialog: Required fields are not marked as being required anymore.
  • Fixed #9316: Property grid: improved asset picker widget is displayed for some properties while it shouldn’t
  • Fixed #9421: Attribute sampler default values are not listed as dependencies on bake
  • Fixed #9338: Upgrader: 2.11 upgrade can fail on some effect files containing legacy backdrop definitions

 

Changelog 2.11.1

Builds (Feb 3rd 2022)

Downloads

Changelog

  • Fixed #9308: Local Vault: Editor freezes when going from the view of a package’s contents back to the vault before the package contents have finished being populated in the window
  • Fixed #9257: Crash when closing project launcher while a package is still downloading
  • Fixed #9204: Material editor: crash when closing material after drawing a selection rectangle in the viewport
  • Fixed #9185: AE: Samplers are not reset when unselected / when the source layer was removed
  • Fixed #9164: GPU debugger: does not work with simple effects

 

Changelog 2.11.0

Builds (Jan 13th 2022)

Downloads

Assets & core-lib

  • #8359: Trail node: Add a new ‘Distance (localspace)’ metric in addition to the existing ‘Distance’, which spawns based on the distance travelled by the particle in the effect’s localspace instead of the worldspace distance.

Rendering

  • #7449: Materials: add dithering rendering feature to Experimental Materials
  • Fixed #8949: Particle light: incorrect lighting at limit between unlit and lit opaque geometry
  • Fixed #8427: 6-way lightmap material is bugged when disabling the “Light” backdrop, renders similarly as if NaNs were produced inside the shader
  • Fixed #8979: Editor: draw calls batching is broken
  • Fixed #9084: Mac – Metal: shaders with textures passed as parameter are not supported
  • Fixed #8724: Freeze when tweaking billboard renderer

Editor

  • #9161: Material Editor: replace on-disk material editor debug effects by code-generated assets
  • #8641: pkri files: Can now right-click > Generate documentation
  • #8878: Editor: display thumbnail capture rect in viewport when hovering capture buttons
  • #8822: Editor: .pkri editor UX improvements
  • #8751: Content browser: Added new “Expand/Collapse All” action for directories
  • Fixed #9190: Material editor: drag & dropping a feature into the rendering adapter also drops static properties while it’s not supported by the nodegraph compiler

Effect editor

  • #2896: Improved assets picker widget in propertygrid
  • #9129: Effect auto-loop: Allow telling the effect editor to fully reset the effect when it loops
  • #9031: Effect interface: Allow previewing exported events in-editor by trigger an effect backdrop
  • #8821: New spotlight backdrop available in effect editor
  • #8411: Debugger: Allow debugging GPU-simulated particles (initial implementation)
  • #8275: Spatial-layer debug view
  • #4732: Can now visualize 3D curves in the viewport
  • #5879: Evaluate simple math expressions in curve editor numerical text boxes
  • #1145: GPU Sim: implement selection
  • Fixed #9036: Copy/pasting samplers from PopcornFX v1 editor into v2 nodegraph crashes the editor

Nodal editor

  • #8893: Nodal editor: Display color rectangle next to unplugged color pins instead of displaying RGBA numeric values when the pin has a ‘Color’ semantic
  • #8556: Templates: Color node: Add additional RGB and Alpha outputs in addition to RGBA
  • #8215: Autofill name when creating an input/output from payload node
  • #6870: Curve editor: New ‘Conform tangents’ and ‘Reset tangents’ action for input, output or both tangents
  • Fixed #9034: Crash when adding a SimpleTriggerOnce or TriggerOnce node in a graph

Graph compiler & optimizer

  • #8463: Layer optimizer: Replace instantaneous multipliers by connection-map rewiring
  • Fixed #9010: Distribution curve of vrand is never constant-folded

Plugins & Third-Party

Unity plugin

  • #7685: Unity: VAT materials support (Rigid, Soft & Fluid)
  • Fixed #9026: Unity: switching camera breaks particles rendering

UE5 plugin

  • #7545: UE5: Port the UE4 plugin (and drop UE4.25 support)

After-effects plugin

  • #9182: AE: Removed unused param ‘enable seeking’
  • #9146: AE: Sort attributes per category name
  • #8971: AE: Ability to drive emitter transforms with screen space / pixel-space motion path
  • #8960: AE: Add support for FXAA post process
  • #8871: AE: Allow browsing vault packages content via the PopcornFX Editor interface
  • Fixed #9179: AE: When zooming in the AfterEffects viewport the effects sometimes disappear / layers behind the effect appear on top
  • Fixed #9150: AE: Crash when changing an effect
  • Fixed #9136: AE: Internal Camera transforms have flipped X and Y axes
  • Fixed #9130: AE: Image sampler is not working with some video format
  • Fixed #9033: AE: Closing and Reopening one project while keeping After Effects open break rendering
  • Fixed #9032: AE: 8bpc render is in incorrect color space
  • Fixed #9030: AE: Attribute samplers freeze render on project load
  • Fixed #9019: AE: Crash occurs when importing Embers.pkfx
  • Fixed #8980: AE: Importing an effect from PublicStore doesn’t work
  • Fixed #8973: AE: First frame don’t override alpha if enabled
  • Fixed #8969: AE: Render cache issue
  • Fixed #8967: AE: Crash when loading an effect with mesh backdrop enabled
  • Fixed #8961: AE: Bloom post effect modifies the alpha values
  • Fixed #8944: AE: FXAA breaks transparency renderer
  • Fixed #8867: AE: Duplicating layer break rendering of effects
  • Fixed #8866: AE: Transparent backgrounds do not work properly

Upgrader

  • v2.11.0.9826: Add spotlight backdrop
  • v2.11.0.9913: Patch shader for multiple light backdrops
  • v2.11.0.11082: Add new corelib files
  • v2.11.0.11413: Remove “MaterialEditor/Presets” folder, effects are now generated

 

Content examples update

New “Tutorials” effects