Forest Pack 8.0.7 released
In this quality-of-life update, we worked closely with the Corona team to increase performance when using animated proxies and improved the experience of using Forest Pack with interactive rendering mode.
Happy new year! There’s no better way to start 2023 than with a new update to your favourite scatterer. Forest Pack 8.0.7 adds several handy behind-the-scenes improvements, especially for Corona users. We’ve been collaborating closely with the Chaos team to make changes on both sides that improve the performance of Forest Pack when used with Corona renderer.
The result is that in this version you should notice some improvements when using Animated Corona proxies. In the past, it was necessary for Forest Pack to load the full mesh from the proxy for each frame, causing problems when scrubbing the timeline. In this release, we now only sample the full geometry on frame one. As this improvement also required changes in Corona, you will need to use the Corona Daily builds or wait until the release of version 10. In addition, the Corona team has included several other improvements for Forest Pack and RailClone in their daily builds, including:
- Support for natively rendering non-geometric objects such as lights with RailClone.
- Native support for Forest Pack’s animation modes.
- Fixed an issue where rendering materials restarted IR with ForestPack
- Fixed Corona is not using the mesh returned by Forest in “GetRenderMesh”
- Fixed Forest Pack objects not rendered in proxy mode
- Fixed Custom objects aren’t rendered when FP render mode is set to Meshes
- Fixed ForestPack shows up in viewport but not in Render, after a base object had quadremesher applied to it
- ForestPack instances are now assigned a more meaningful wire color
Fans of interactive rendering will be pleased to learn that we’ve improved performance and reliability. In previous releases, Forest objects were rebuilt with each view change, but now they respect the rules set using the Camera > Enable on Viewport IR parameter. We now also avoid rebuilding Forest objects when using interactive rendering for several cases where it wasn’t necessary.
There are a couple of other handy changes to make working with Forest Pack faster. First of all, we’ve redesigned some of the toolbar icons to make them easier to identify at a glance, and added a new button for quickly adding Forest Sets.
We’ve also changed the way in which multiple objects loaded from the library are organised in the items list, in the past this was somewhat random, but now it they are arranged alphabetically making it much easier to manage.
To see a full list of all the changes and fixes, you can visit the release notes in our documentation.
To update, you’ll find the latest version in the products section of your user panel. If your maintenance has expired, don’t worry it can be renewed for another year with no penalty for lapsed plans.
