Introducing HDR Viewer
This release cycle introduces the Moonlight HDR Viewer. This is a simple tool for viewing high dynamic range image data. The rendering of the high dynamic range data is hardware accellerated using OpenGL, which means that display updates are truely instant. Radiance RGBE and OpenEXR image files are supported.
What's New in Moonlight|3D?
Moonlight|3D was subject to a number of small, but noticable improvements. The most important ones are:
- The property editor has now a "object history" dropdown which makes it easier to select operator graph nodes that influence the currently selected object.
- The Transform and Extrude tools support snapping.
- By default, the structural wireframe of mesh objects is now properly occluded. It can also be fully disabled and fully enabled.
- The Create Box and Create Plane tools can now create boxes and planes with a user-defined initial subdivision (Thanks go to Stefan Altmayer for these patches).
- The Duplicate Objects tool is now able to apply rotation and scaling to the duplicated objects.
- The Wavefront OBJ exporter can export material data and is now able to export either the whole scene or selected mesh objects within it.
Scenes in Moonlight|3D can easily grow to hundreds of objects with literally a thousand OG nodes containing their construction history. This release removes a few performance bottlenecks with scenes of that complexity.
As with all previous releases, this one also contains fixes for lots of bugs. Barring some grave bugs which need fixing, this will be the last release in the 0.2.x series.
What's New in the Moonlight Application Framework?
Minor improvements have been made to the Moonlight Application Framework:
- Importers and exporters now can have properties which are displayed by the Import and Export menu actions.
- Image format detection is much faster now when loading images on a best guess basis.
- The Radiance RGBE and OpenEXR image format plugins have greatly improved format support and load images faster.
Apart from these changes, there was the usual bug fixing. The Moonlight Application Framework will undergo considerable changes after this release, which makes this one the last release in the 0.1.x series.
A Glimpse Into the Crystal Sphere: Future Developments
Work on the next versions of these programs has already begun. There are a lot of new features in the pipeline. The most important ones are:
- Improved properties: this will lead to numerous improvements in the program. The most obvious ones will be proper descriptive labels in the UI and UI elements that are more appropriate for the specific values. Also, this will allow much more advanced features like expressions as property values that are reevaluated on the fly.
- Undo/Redo: implementing this efficiently requires a lot of effort, so this feature might actually be introduced incrementally.
- A new icon-based toolchest: the icons for the new toolchest have been presented in one of the current progress reports. Unfortunately, the code changes are not yet completed, so this feature had to be delayed.
Some development work has already been made on all of the features in this list, so expect at least a considerable subset of them in Moonlight|3D 0.3.0 and the Moonlight Application Framework 0.2.0.