Alpha 39 is now released with a bunch of new features in the editor and more big updates to the library. Sprite Sheet Export PostFX I’ve added a number new post effects to the sprite sheet exporter so that you can modify and tweak the effect before you export it as a sprite sheet. Currently there’s 24 post effects including blurs, colour adjustments, masks, stylising, distortions and image based masks and layers. Now now in this version these are free to use but when I release the beta (very close now!) I’ll be gating these behind a premium version. You’ll Read more
Alpha 39 – Export PostFX
I’ve just released alpha version 38 which finally includes GPU simulated particles as an option in the editor under Emitter Options. It’s been a busy month setting this up but I’m very happy with the results so far. Pretty much everything that’s simulated on the CPU can now be simulated on the GPU with one or two exceptions. Here’s a copy/paste of what’s in the documentation regarding the new feature: Running Emitters on the GPU Any particle emitter can be moved onto the graphics card by checking Run on GPU under Emitter Options. Once it’s on, a compute shader moves, Read more
Alpha 37 just got released with another bunch of bug fixes and new features for some more artistic control for rotations. New rotation options for ribbons and particle emitters I’ve added some new rotation types for ribbons and particle emitters other then just randomly rotating in a sphere. Note that sequential, ping pong and shuffled do the rotation on a disc rather then in sphere so a good idea is the check the new option under Emitter Options called “Orient to Camera on Creation” so that it doesn’t look flat or off kilter if that’s not what you want. For Read more
Alpha 36 is now available to download with a whole bunch of new things, a lot of which is API related. Here are the main headlines: TFX files can now be saved as folders I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now, .tfx files are basically binary files which is fine but if you’re tracking changes in a repository like git then every change means that the entire binary gets committed which if you have a lot of shapes stored in the library means that it can very quickly ramp up the amount of space that it takes Read more
Alpha 35 is now released with a few new features that allows you to animate ribbons in 4 distinct ways to add more life to them so that they’re not so static. Ribbon Noise Under ribbon behaviour overtime is the option to enable noise which you can use to apply either simplex or value noise to ribbons overtime. There’s a few graphs and other settings you can use to get different looks: Clip Size and Offset I have refactored the 2 graphs clip start and clip end and changed them to the much more intuitive and easy to use clip Read more
Alpha 34 is now released which sees what’s hopefully the last big semi-breaking changes. Before this change, velocity was calculated each frame by taking the base velocity and multiplying it by the velocity overtime graph, so you would draw the velocity of the particle over its lifetime to dictate exactly its speed as it aged. This had a few drawbacks: particles lacked a physical movement style and felt more mechanical, especially when it came to noise, where particles would all move too uniformly. Now velocity accumulates over the particle lifetime so that particles can behave in a much more fluid Read more
Finally, it’s been a year and a half but after a lot of refactoring (see last news about the renderer update) I’ve just released the latest alpha version for Windows and also Linux which is a first for TimelineFX. They’ll be no Mac version for now, there’s no problems running it on Mac, the only issue is the fact I have to pay Apple a 100 bucks to go through their app signing process which I’ll be more happy to do when we go in to beta a few versions away. Not only has there been a huge amount of Read more
Sorry it’s been so long for an update but basically I think after the last update I spent 3 months restructuring somethings in the TimelineFX library and then decided that the renderer really needed some work as it was a little cumbersome to work with. So I made the decision to spend some time refactoring it and then 10 months later here we are! Was it worth it? Yes definitely, I am very pleased with where my renderer is at and will have it as a separate open source project that I might start pushing out more. This is a Read more
Already a little over 2 months since the last release but finally I got this one out. This is quite a big release with a lot changing under the hood which meant a lot of refactoring and then a few headaches getting the mac version up to speed but I got there in the end. These are the main changes: API Re-factor which changes how you get sprites from TimelineFX to the GPU. This is a really positive change that I’m happy with. Before this change, in order to draw sprites that timeline fx produced you would basically have to Read more
Another new alpha version has been uploaded with more new features and improvements. Here’s an overview of some of them: 2d Paths Paths are now available for 2d as well as 3d. They have pretty much exactly the same features as the 3d paths with the obvious exception that there’s no z axis for some of the settings. Otherwise the same generators are there plus I added a basic selection of preset paths under the Add Emitter menu. There’s still a lot I want to do to improve the interface for creating paths such as direct node manipulation and Read more
