PlantFactory now offers a leaf clusters creation toolbox. A leaf cluster is a baked texture map of high-resolution geometry which can be used for deriving lightweight plants that work especially well in real-time environments.
Leaf clusters support baking of Color / Diffuse channels, normal maps, backlighting, Ambient Occlusion and highlights from up to three different perspectives. In addition, it will autogenerate a component based on the leaf node with one, two or three crossed planes, which can be loaded immediately from the content browser as a ready-to-go-asset.
Other notable new features in VUE and PlantFactory 2021.1
As with previous releases, e-on software has also added many other new features and UI/UX enhancements such as:
- All applications now natively support MacOS BigSur (running the apps on an M1 architecture still requires going through Rosetta 2 currently).
- Added support for the Substance GPU engine with expected speed gains of up to 200%, depending on the Substance material.
- Several new nodes in the Function Editor: For advanced normal map creation, RGB composer & decomposer as well as a "Normal" input; tree new cloud inputs: Cloud starting altitude, Cloud ending altitude and Cloud height.
- The Path Tracer now supports both Relighting and NPR.
- Real-world unit displacement mapping.
- Vastly improved UV unwrapping
- Up to 25% reduced computation time for complex plants with over a million polygons
- New 3D displacement functionality for the segment node for utilizing vector displacement
- New "Position in distribution" mode in the "Parent parameters" node, which respects the start and end distribution values for children
- Improved compression of *.tpf species for smaller file sizes
- Improved Ambient Occlusion preview in the 3D view
- And a lot more
(1) Export and Integration Plugins are only available in Professional and Enterprise solutions
300 New collection items
e-on software continues to release its owned content collection formerly sold on Cornucopia3D to users of its new software solutions. The 2021.1 release includes the last batch of over 300 new 3D assets comprised of atmospheres, materials, vehicles, animals, sample scenes etc. This finalizes the full former Cornucopia3D content collection representing a total of 1250 new free content assets added over the course of the last 4 releases.
Availability
The new update is available for download as a free software update for all registered users of the company’s VUE, PlantFactory and PlantCatalog solutions. Users will find the software update download links on their
user account page (under the Software Center tab)
