Changelog

[Ryuu]

Since it was being a bit cumbersome to fill new release features, fixes and issues into the release info mail template (and I guess nobody scanned that for new feature list anyway), it may be better to have a changelog here in the forum.

New features

• Render settings dialog sections are now collapsible. The current implementation is just temporary and will be replaced by a better one soon in the future.
• Enable adaptivity option added to the render settings dialog
• Regular sampling pattern experimental feature added. This optimizes the pixel sampling pattern during rendering and may give up to 10% performance boost, depending on the scene (at least according to my limited measurements). The control (named random sampling) is located in the performance section of the render settings dialog and has following values:
  
  • All passes - pixels in all passes will be sampled randomly. This is the default and corresponds to the original Corona sampling pattern.
  • None - pixels in all passes will be sampled in a regular pattern (from bottom of the image to the top)
  • First pass - pixels in the first pass will be sampled randomly, then the renderer switches to regular sampling pattern

Fixes

• After opening another SketchUp scene, material property and selection updates were not correctly propagated from SketchUp to Corona material editor.
• The plugin would crash when launching material editor without an activated Corona license.
• Materials were not reset properly when loading a another scene. This caused the old materials to be used in the new scene.
• Texture coordinates from materials applied to groups should now be exported correctly.

Issues

• Interactive rendering is still a bit unstable when changes are being made in the scene geometry.
• When sections of the render settings dialog are (un)collapsed, the controls may sometimes be drawn in a wrong place. This is just a visual issue and may be "fixed" by collapsing/uncollapsing the section.
• Material transfer from SketchUp to Corona does not work correctly when there are non-english characters in material name (letters with accents and similar).

[Ryuu]

Features:

• Back side material override option added to render settings dialog performance section. This causes the back side face material to be the same as front side material (either always or only if the back side is set to default material). My measurements show up to 3x performance gain (depending on the scene).
• Drag & drop implemented for textures/maps in material editor. Default action is to copy the map, while dropping with the SHIFT key held results in move (the source slot will be cleared). It should also work with dragging image files from outside (explorer, total commander, ...) to the slot and vice versa.
• Minor optimization when front and back face materials share some properties.
• New button in render settings dialog which sets the image resolution to the same resolution as current SketchUp viewport.
• New installer - code & assets shamelessly stolen from Corona for Max installer :)

Changes:

• Single channel maps (like opacity or bump) are now displayed in grayscale in the material editor.
• When the plugin DLL fails to load, just a simple error message will be displayed in the Ruby console instead of the convoluted message in modal popup window.
• When the plugin DLL fails to load, a popup window will be displayed as well as the message in Ruby console.

Fixes:

• Plugin loader now detects 32-bit version of SketchUp and prints an error message to Ruby console in that case instead of just failing to load the plugin.
• Toggling render hidden geometry in settings had no effect without triggering scene re-export by some other change.
• When material was modified from within SketchUp, multiple restarts of the material preview in our editor caused noticable delays.
• Corona no longer crashes when the image file is deleted or renamed after it has been set as a diffuse texture in our material editor.
• The plugin was crashing when the original diffuse texture filename (before being loaded into SketchUp) contained spaces.

Issues:

• Dragging textures from/to some outside window does not work correctly if cursor crosses SketchUp viewport.

[Ryuu]

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find as much time for SketchUp as I hoped. Instead of implementing major features over a long time we have decided it would be better to do smaller updates, until we can find a new full-time SketchUp developer. We hope to be able to do periodic weekly incremental releases with minor updates and bugfixes.

Features:

• Updated to the latest version of Corona rendering core.
• Vignette and Bloom & Glare post processing features enabled for the frame buffer window.

Changes:

• Sampling mode setting removed. According to the latest measurements, there was no actual performance gain once adaptivity kicks in.
• Updated (un)installer to the Corona 1.5 version

[Ryuu]

Changes:

• The VFB window save buttons are no longer linked to the render settings output file.
• "Render" and "Start IR" VFB buttons now work correctly. The "Render" always starts a non-interactive render while "Start IR" always starts an interactive render.

Fixes:

• Fixed wrong output path value handling in the render settings dialog.

[Ryuu]

Features:

• Denoising implemented (frame buffer rollout in the render settings).

Changes:

• Autosave controls temporarily removed from render settings. The autosave functionality is still not implemented yet.
• Corona log messages are now shown in the Ruby console.

Fixes:

• Crash when the render output path is invalid. The error message "unknown exception" is not very descriptive at the moment, but at least the plugin should not crash anymore.

[Ryuu]

Just a very small release this time. I'm busy working on 1.5 release and I don't have much time for SketchUp right now.

Fixes:

• Material editor is no longer crashing SketchUp when opened.

[Ryuu]

• Update to the latest version of rendering core (provides automatically some "free" features like subsampling in IR)
• Support for SketchUp 2017