We’re pleased to announce a new release of the Nope Forge project. It’s been only a month since the launch, but we already have a number of new features we would like to show off.
The key feature of this release is probably the addition of the fractal noise, the cornerstone of any serious CGI work.
By default the noise is in greyscale, but it comes with a color remapping filter which can be used to build any arbitrary gradient pattern to apply on a source. Since it’s a generic rendering filter, it is of course not limited to the noise.
Another thing we wanted to do for a very long time was to make it easy to
create a texture from any given part of the graph. We already had the
RenderToTexture node, but we needed something simpler to use. We decided to
make it possible for the Texture2D node to directly accept another tree of
nodes as data source. This makes it extremely simple to build masks, create
displacement map, or apply any post-processing of your imagination, on any given
part of the graph.
More low-key but still impactful for creators, the Eval* nodes gained the
ability to pick from multidimensional inputs. This is particularly useful
for example when you want to work with vector based live control inputs such
as colors.
More specific but still useful for presentation, comparison and experiments, a
GridLayout node was added to display a number of subscenes following an
arbitrary grid layout.
The viewer also received a lot of fixes, most notably on Windows where we are finally providing a proper standalone build. A few other features also slipped in, such as the GIF and AV1 export profiles, and the possibility to drag’n drop scripts directly into the main window.
Finally, we poured a lot of love into the documentation. Many pages were entirely refreshed, and now include (in particular in the howto pages) video previews with their associated standalone code snippets. They also come with the visual graph representation to help understanding the graph tree structure.
That’s it for this release, but as usual for updates and more frequent content you can follow us on social networks (see the website footer).