News in Simplygon 10.1
Shader based material casting
Our new ComputeCaster material data caster uses a Vulkan based backend, and supports user-generated HLSL or GLSL shaders to cast any data available in the scene, combined with any side-band loaded data from e.g. custom material graphs etc. The caster system is Vulkan 1.3 based, and supports CPU-only workflows through SwiftShader or LavaPipe.
Support for combined quad and triangles in quad reduction
The quad reducer now supports reduction of triangulated mesh components when using reduction targets OnScreenSize or MaxDeviation.
Improved support for highly triangle dense meshes in reduction algorithm
The new HighDensityMeshReducerProcessor and -Pipeline APIs adds a new class of reduction processors, which is memory and performance optimized for multi-million triangle meshes (e.g. from scan-sources or sculpting tools).
NVIDIA Micro-Mesh support
Simplygon now supports the Micro-Mesh compressed displacement technology from NVidia. Displacement data which is cast to tessellated attributes can now be output to glTF using the NV_micromaps and NV_displacement_micromap extensions, along with latest version of .bary file format for micromaps.
Support for skinned mesh in FBX
Our FBX importer and export now supports skinning data, which means that bones and influence weights are preserved when working with FBX files.
Unreal Engine 5.1 integration support
Since our last release Epic Games has released a new version of Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 5.1. We have added a Simplygon plugin which supports this new engine version.
Support of Nanite source mesh handling
Nanite assets are handled differently under the hood in Unreal Engine (compared to regular static meshes) and we noticed our plugins only worked with the Nanite fallback mesh. In this release, we have fixed this issue by introducing a new option which lets the user choose if they would rather get the original high poly source mesh data instead. This new option is called Use Source Mesh Data and can be found in our LOD Recipe manager and Standin Outliner.
And more
Apart from these items there are a large number of improvements to the core functionality which you can read about in the release notes.