Just released JWildfire V3.20 – which is another community release, thanks to Brad, Rick and Luca for your contributions!
This is a major release featuring a new kind of mesh-export: point-clouds. Point-clouds basically are meshes with 1-point-polygons.
In contrast to the solid meshes, the “points” of the generated point-clouds may have also an individual color and an alpha channel
(which may be used in rendering).
3D-Packages like Houdini can render point-clouds in the way that each point is represented by a little sphere
(you usually can adjust the size of those spheres), generating a “solid” shape.
You can apply materials to point-clouds like to any regular mesh. Especially in Houdini, the points keep their individual
(diffuse) color.
You can also generate “solid” meshes from point-clouds, for example using the ball-pivoting-algorithm inside
MeshLab.
Important Parameters for point-cloud-generation in JWildfire (use “Output type” POINTCLOUD to enable it):
- CELL-SIZE: the program uses an octree to quantize the space into little small cubes. All samples inside a cube
are later condensed into one point of the point-cloud. So, this setting basically affects the
“resolution” of the generated mesh. But beware, please make it only smaller in small steps,
otherwise memory consumption may grow in an “explosive” way - RENDER QUALITY: overall number of samples, increase it only if your mesh has noise/holes in it
- OUTPUT FORMAT: you may either use *.ply or *.obj. But beware, this option has also an impact on the generation
of the point-cloud:- PLY-Format: only vertices (“points”), with color and alpha channel (works good for Houdini)
- OBJ-Format: vertices and 1-point-polygons, NO color and NO alpha channel (works good for Lightwave Hypervoxels)
Complete list of changes (you can also see this list inside the program at the any time, see Help->List of changes ):
- New “POINTCLOUD”-generator inside the Mesh-Generator.
- New Variations – Thanks to dark-beam (Luca) and Brad Stefanov for conversions
- Spirograph3D by Rick Sidwell.
- Hypershift, Helicoid, Helix by Zy0rg.
- Atan by FractalDesire.
- Chunk, Erf, Erf3D, Gamma, XErf by zephyrtronium.
- Circular, DSpherical, Shift by Tatyana Zabanova.
- Circular2 by Tatyana Zabanova variables added by Brad Stefanov.
- Pressure_wave by timothy-vincent.
- Fixes
- Fixed issue reading apo parameters in GlynnSim variations. By Rick Sidwell
- Fix bug reading repeated variations in a transform. By Rick Sidwell
- Added lgamma to Math.lib for gamma variation to work.
- Fixed some performance problem in solid rendering
- fixed a problem with calculation of normals in solid rendering
Just click the “Random flames” button to start playing around and have fun 🙂