What's New in Version 9 

• Edit Guides
  • Brush textures allow painting textures directly on hair
  • Moved Edit Guides mode selection to its own rollout for better organization
  • Reordered Edit Guides rollouts for brushes in a more user-friendly configuration
  • New Edit Guides button icons for improved UI
  • Improved "current channel" combo box with tooltips, colors, and less verbosity
  • Channel selector replaced with better drop-down and "paint channel" button
  • Color box moved from paint brush to channel drop-down alongside channel value
  • Using color value when modifying color channels and spinner for greyscale ones
  • Show Channels map in Edit Guides object mode
  • Removed Edit Guides channel value spinner - color box now used for all channel types
  • Delete channel option removes compound channels
  • Clump index channel name can now be specified
  • Added curved extensions option to grow/shrink brush
  • Major speed optimization when editing control points
• Clump Modifier
  • Interactive braiding
  • Clump manipulators
  • Using colors to differentiate clumps and clump hair selections
  • Generated clump centers calculated more correctly at the center of each clump
  • Added UI slider to control clump editing position
  • Improved clump selection by including strand widths into hit testing
• Generate Guide Data Modifier
  • Visualize output channel and group data
• Mesh from Strands Modifier
  • Procedural texture generation
  • New "Cap faces" attribute for generating closed strand meshes
  • Added ability to close the tubes generated by mesh from strands
  • Strand group meshing
• Merge Modifier
  • Merge blending and overlap resolution
• Surface Comb Modifier
  • Curved sinks
  • Transform gizmo now properly orients itself based on middle sink's surface transformation
  • Transform appears at the center point of a selected sink instead of averaged point
  • Sinks can now be rotated and scaled (previously only move worked)
• Alembic Export
  • Alembic export dialog now uses Qt (replacing old Win32 version)
  • Strand rotations Alembic import/export support
  • Export "groom_color" attribute to UE Alembic
• Length Modifier
  • Curved Extensions option
• Frizz Modifier
  • Scale Randomness option
• Warp Roots Modifier
  • Procedurally adjustable root density
• Adopt External Guides Modifier
  • Assign guide dependencies to hair based on external guides (useful for UE export)
• Ground Strands modifier
  • Character mesh (separate from Distribution mesh) can now be assigned
• Hair from Guides modifier
  • Combined root count related parameters into one map
• Grooms
  • New Feather, Hair Ball grooms
  • Updated and improved Mesh Plumage groom with properly named nodes and directed strands
  • Improved groom icons for better visual recognition
• Performance and Display
  • GPU hair display - offloading viewport geometry calculation to the GPU for faster performance
  • Volumetric viewport hair shadows enabled by default with adjustable parameters
• UI Improvements
  • About dialog converted to Qt
  • All global settings now in a separate Qt Settings dialog
  • Settings Reset to defaults button added
  • Icons for all Modify panel UI buttons

 

Bug Fixes 

• Fixed exception when merging strands with 100% "first" hair overlap
• Fixed "Grab/Pull" option not working with paint brush
• Fixed correct edit mode not specified in Edit Guides mode selector after scene load
• Fixed display selection overlay in Edit Guides by default
• Fixed crashes due to strand channel UI initialization
• Fixed mesh color channel not being assignable
• Fixed redundant parameter loading from paramblock after transform end action in clump modifier
• Fixed default brush textures not installed
• Fixed clump manipulator cage not updating during drags
• Fixed clump manipulator transforms sometimes incorrect at base
• Fixed Transfer Normals modifier not working
• Fixed slow UI navigation after caching roots
• Fixed unable to create per-vertex channels in Edit Guides
• Fixed Hair from Guides param map reorganization
• Fixed Guides from Curves preset offered when no curves selected
• Fixed crash when using "Cap Ends" option with group meshes in Mesh from Strands
• Fixed crash deleting mirrored sink
• Fixed crash reloading scene with stored dynamic baked modifier
• Fixed segment interpolation
• Fixed Push Away From Surface not changing output when input geometry changes
• Fixed hair overlay display with 100% opacity
• Fixed lines drawn in tools with non-0 thickness treated as screen/pixel-scale values
• Fixed tools draw polylines without z-buffer
• Fixed clumps closest to viewer selected on click
• Fixed curves imported into Edit Guides sometimes straightened at end
• Fixed GPU hair not displayed in orthographic views
• Fixed Lengthener "jumping" points issue when using curved extensions
• Various other smaller fixes

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