Simplygon 10.3 Release Notes ​

Simplygon 10.3.5200.0 ​

New features ​

• New API interface: AttributeTessellationData, for accessing tessellation data of a geometry data

Improvements & changes ​

Core ​

• Fixed adding of some Attribute Tessellation U16 fields that were missing.
• Better reuse of Vulkan devices, with lower setup overhead, and nicer to the driver.
• Added support for internal logging which is fetched directly through Simplygon::PollLog
• String serialization now supports up to 1GB strings
• Clipping geometry in RemeshingProcessor and AggregationProcessor now attempts to detect when the clipping geometry is not water tight around the process geometry, and if so disables the culling instead of incorrectly culling the entire scene.
• A new setting, SourceTexCoordLevel, has been introduced to the lightmap texture coordinate generator in the aggregation pipeline. This setting allows you to specify which source texture coordinate you want to use as input when generating lightmap texture coordinates
• New ChartAggregatorSetting: SplitMirroredCharts. Introduce a setting that toggles whether to split up charts that have mirrored texcoords.

Batch tool & Grid ​

• Added support for disabling mDNS discovery, and using a static list of servers instead.

Unreal Engine 5 ​

• Improved landscape culling by extending the amount of landscape that gets sent to Simplygon to use for culling.
• Added early out in SimplygonWorldPartitionBuilder if Simplygon is not initialized.
• Changed default Maximum Layers in MappingImageSettings for RemeshingHLODBuilder to reduce memory footprint.
• Added new lightmap settings to stand-in to be able to set the lightmap resolution.
• Enhanced lightmap texture coordinate handling for near stand-in.
• Fixed bug where Nanite Fallback meshes using BillboardCloud would lose section information
• Added shader switch to toggle off parts in SG_BaseImposter material to correctly used masked texture for ray traced shadows.
• Disable instancing Simplygon spGeometryData in plugin when generating Near Standin.

Unity ​

• The LOD GameObject generated by a processing is now cleaner with less orphaned nodes

Bug fixes ​

Core ​

• Fixed bug that thrashed texture memory when using embedded textures with cascaded pipelines in TIFF output format.
• Fixed bug in scenegraphimporter that caused crashes when reporting warnings.
• ChartAggregator with SeparateOverlappingCharts: Fixed a bug where charts were not separated properly.

Unreal Engine 4.27 ​

• Fixed issues in telemetry module.
• Fixed memory leak in the static mesh exporter

Unreal Engine 5.3 & Unreal Engine 5.4: ​

• Fixed crash when running editor as -game.
• Fixed Stand-In build key limitation when having hundreds of Actors as part of the same Stand-In.
• Fixed build key generation for Stand-Ins where nullptr material entries are present.
• Optimized Add- and Remove Stand-In functions for speed.
• Fixed issues in resource logic in Job queue system (RAM and VRAM).
• Fixed issues caused by SubActor entries in Stand-In being nullptr.

Unity ​

• Fixed bug where filtering of objects sent for processing would not distinguish between objects to process and meta objects in selection sets.
• Fixed an issue where GameObjects in visibility selection sets (for example cameras or occluders) were incorrectly included in the processed LOD.

Blender ​

• Fixed a bug where using the Simplygon FBX-importer from Python scripts via Blender failed to import materials correctly.

Simplygon 10.3.2100.0 ​

New features ​

• Unreal Engine 5.4 support.

Improvements & changes ​

Unreal Engine ​

• Increased default value for multisampling from 2 to 4 for our HLOD Remeshing builder to get a better balance between quality and memory usage.
• Fixed garbage collection crash issue when system memory > 75%.

Bug fixes ​

• Attribute Tessellation U16 fields were not added correctly, now fixed
• Fixed bug which in some cases caused poor sampling accuracy when using ReductionProcessor and baking textures or displacement.
• Fixed a bug where a scene with multiple meshes having unique TexCoord fields caused an "field already exists" error.
• Unity
  • Fixed an issue where Simplygon did not clean up temporary files when processing failed.
  • Plugin now emits an error on export if a pipeline contains ComputeCasters, but the Vulkan SDK can not be found. The processing still runs but produces additional errors.
  • Fixed bug where running remeshing without material casters would cause a crash.
  • Fixed an issue where the wrong material got applied to a LOD when processing a scene with shared meshes using different materials, with "Export meshes as unique" unchecked. Reduction without material baking now handles this setup, while any other pipeline will still yield incorrect results.
  • Added warnings when processing with unsupported Planar/Triplanar uv selection in HDRP.
  • Fix for Standard material secondary maps where plugin ignored UV set selection.

Simplygon 10.3.500.0 ​

New features ​

Unreal Engine ​

• Major improvements to HLOD workflows for World Partition worlds. Learn the details by reading our HLOD concept page and follow the HLOD Quickstart to get it to work in your project.
  • New custom HLOD Builder class called SimplygonHLODRemeshingBuilder which includes all relevant Remeshing processor settings to the HLOD Layer workflow.
  • New WorldPartitionBuilder class called SimplygonWorldPartitionBuilder which together with the SimplygonHLODRemeshingBuilder and Simplygon Grid gives great processing speed-ups.
• New Simplygon Quickstarts widget for easier onboarding for new users.

Unity ​

Major improvements to import/export infrastructure. The plugin no longer uses USD as intermediary format. As a result, most known issues with the plugin has been resolved and the plugin behavior is more consistent and stable. The new plugin exclusively uses Compute Casters for material baking, which generally produces better results across all pipelines. Unity Standard (BiRP), URP and HDRP render pipelines are supported, currently with some important fundamental limitations:

• Only the 'Lit' shaders are supported (URP, HDRP)
• Only 'Opaque' surface type is supported (URP, HDRP)
• Only 'Metallic' material workflow is supported (URP)

See Known issues for issues pertaining Compute Casters - these are relevant to the Unity plugin.

Blender ​

• Blender 4.0 support
• merge_vertices is now set to True when importing data back into Blender to add vertex connectivity

Python ​

• Python 3.12 support

Remeshing processor ​

• New target "MaxDeviation" available as an alternative to "OnScreenSize" for consistent detail level across input scenes with different sizes.
• New settings:
  • RemeshingTarget
  • MaxDeviation
  • MaxDerivedOnScreenSize
• New optionally settable "MaxEdgeLength", allows generation of meshes with more uniform triangle distribution.

Visibility ​

• New "VisibilityCameraMode" settings allows easy setup of sphere and hemisphere visibility for culling and reduction weighting in all relevant processors without having to add cameras to the scene.
• New settings:
  • VisibilityCameraMode
  • HemisphereUpVector
  • HemisphereCoverageAngle
  • HemisphereFidelity
  • SphereFidelity

TexCoord adjuster ​

• New tool: TexCoord Adjuster, adjusts texcoords to cover pixel centers of user specified texture dimensions.

Impostor from single view ​

• New settings: OverrideCenter, OverrideRadius and UseOverrideCenterAndRadius that enable manual overrides to the center and radius of the impostor.

Misc ​

• AmbientOcclusionCaster now has a "FlipBackfacingNormals" option that aligns sampling directions with the output geometry normals, giving more consistent results when input with inconsistent surfaces have been remeshed.

Improvements & changes ​

• Installer is moved to .NET 8
• Add setting dependency for remeshing settings, bone settings and foliage settings.
• Improved support for larger input geometry. Now supports scenes with up to about ~200 million triangles.
• Increased precision of geometry culling in relevant processors.
• Added DeduplicateVertices method to GeometryData. Removes redundant duplication of vertex data, and remaps the vertex ids.
• Added OverrideTangentCalculator to MappingImageSettings. This makes it possible to override the global settings for tangent calculation, and specify TangentCalculatorType as well as TangentCalculatorInvertV on a per-processing basis.
• Added sg_DestinationTriangleId and sg_DestinationTexCoord to the compute caster, so a shader can modify behavior based on the destination.
• Added sg_TriangleNormal and sg_DestinationTriangleNormal to the compute caster, which contains the source and destination triangle normals.
• Materials exported from glTF are now in the order defined in the material table, so users can expect the same indexing as internally.
• ComputeCaster now supports pre-built, reused shaders, to improve casting performance. This is especially useful if most shaders are identical, or reused in a lot of castings.
• Billboard cloud processor now supports having ComputeCaster materials as opacity when creating tight fitting impostors
• Chart aggregator now supports ComputeCaster materials.

Maya ​

• Better handling of hard edges on write back in to Maya. Applied to triangle as well as quad meshes.

3ds Max ​

• Added Max 2024 support.

Unreal Engine ​

• Add EditCondition for Simplygon pipelines.
• Hiding unimplemented/irrelevant pipeline settings
• For Unreal Engine 5.3 plugin version:
  • General
    • Add link to documentation in Simplygon's drop-down menu.
    • New custom icons for Stand-In Actors, Visibility Samples Visualizer and Clipping Planes Visualizer.
    • New GUI widgets for various Simplygon pipeline settings.
    • Updated python examples, see /Content/Python/simplygon_examples.py
    • Fixed issue caused by a mismatch in UV count during flattening
    • Fixed issue related to UVs during writeback of BillboardCloud
    • New internal task manager for better and more robust handling of export, import and processing tasks in the plugin
    • New flatten material texture coordinate cache, which helps improving export times. Can be switch on/off in the plugins settings.
    • Improved handling of instanced static meshes when exporting. This improves export times and reduces sizes of Simplygon scene files.
    • New plugin setting to enable/disable outputting SimplygonBatch logs to disk. (Useful when debugging Grid)
    • Added support for Vertex Weights using vertex color channel for Reduction and Aggregation.
  • Stand-In
    • Add Merge Physics Data option which copies the simple collision from the source actors and adds it to the built Stand-In.
    • Stabilization of how we handle unbuilt/dirty Stand-Ins.
    • Unbuilt/dirty Stand-Ins now keeps the old Static Mesh until it's been rebuilt instead of clearing it.
    • Stand-In Outliner GUI clean-up.
  • LOD Recipe
    • Cascaded LOD Chain
    • Raytracing MinLOD
    • Replace Nanite Fallback Mesh
    • Option to bit pack material attributes into vertex color and secondary UV (Cheaper HWRT material)
  • HLOD
    • Remove support for features relying on the ProxyLOD Module, eg. HLOD using HLOD Outliner, Merge Actors tool, etc.
    • Add HLOD support for World Partitioned worlds through our custom HLOD Builder SimplygonHLODRemeshingBuilder.

Grid ​

• Improved agent utilization when distributing pipelines asynchronously. Grid jobs should now be better balanced between agents.
• New global setting: BatchLogPath. Useful when you want check SimplygonBatch log when executing pipelines in RunInNewProcess or RunDistributedUsingSimplygonGrid
• New global setting: GridLoadLimit. Use it to limit agent(s) maximum load limit.
• New global setting: GridDiscoverTimeout. The time SimplygonBatch waits before presenting agents found during -Discover
• A failed grid job will now by default retry 3 times before it is considered as failed job.
• Added new input arguments to SimplygonGridAgent.exe: -MaxJobs, -LogVerbose and -LogClient. See grid settings for more information.
• Added new global settings: GridAgentDiscoveryDelay, GridRetryLimitForFailedJob, GridAgentBalancerJobTolerance, GridEnableAgentIpSorting, GridOverloadedTimeout and GridEnableVerboseLogging. See grid settings for more information.
• Agent version check is now based on a minimum agent version, which makes the agent compatibility with newer Simplygon SDK version more relaxed.

Documentation ​

• Improved styling of documentation incl. info boxes image caption and image zoom
• Corrected code syntax in Unity example
• Corrected spelling errors
• Added Unity HDRP getting started article
• Updated capabilities table with Unity URP and HDRP support
• Improved examples with proper error handling

Bug fixes ​

• 3ds Max
  • Fixed issue related to uv generation with multiple vertexcolors where the plugin incorrectly grabbed uv0.
  • Fixed crash issue due to invalid object state when calling GetLODSwitchCameraDistance.
• Maya
  • Fix for Maya plugin UI stealing focus
  • SimplygonUI() method can now use named arguments
• Unreal Engine
  • Fixed normal recalculation HardEdgeAngle not working as expected in the UE native reduction interface
  • Fixed invalid setting for High-density reducer (4.27, 5.3)
• Batch
  • Fixed string buffer issue when parsing strings from grid agent
• Grid
  • Fixed an issue where the environment variable SIMPLYGON_10_GRID_IFINDEX was not being properly respected in certain scenarios.
  • Addressed the hangs and stability issues of discover requests when the CPU load was high. This also fixed the problem of missing some agents during discovery.
  • Fixed mDNS crash when there are high amount of discover requests.
  • Successful local fallback processing should no longer throw exception when a grid job has failed.
  • Fixed false positive Found unknown sub-info errors.
  • Fixed an issue where the agent could get stuck reading mDNS queries that were retransmitted between subnets. This put -Discover in a state where it could not find this agent.
  • Fixed an issue where the fallback flag was not properly respected when, for example, an ongoing batch process on agents was manually terminated.
  • Fixed an issue where the Vulkan status was reported incorrectly when running the agent as a service.
• FBX
  • Fix to avoid creating bind poses for static meshes
  • Fixed an issue where geometric transforms were applied twice
• GLTF
  • Fixed a bug where multi-primitive geometries did not get the geometry name set
• Fixed issue with running Billboard Cloud processing on a single core.
• Fix for custom string fields on scenes and geometries causing crashes when run through some processors
• Fixed unnamed fields in input causing issues in FBX importer and processing.
• Fixed unsupported custom geometry field types causing issues in processing.
• Fixed crash when importing TIFF images with unexpected metadata formats
• Flipbook processor no longer discards the input vertex normals
• Flipbook processor now use texcoord level set in mapping image when generating flipbook.

Know Issues ​

• When used with Compute Caster materials, Chart Aggregator outputs a warning about missing textures. This is generally not a critical issue, but one impactful side effect is that the Chart Aggregator Mode 'Original Pixel Density' does not work.
• When used with Compute Caster materials, Impostor Processor pipelines may generate incorrect normal maps