What's new
GraphN 1.1.0 - 2022-11-24
Unreal Engine 4.27 & 5.1 support!
This new version now gives you support for UE4.27 and the release build of Unreal Engine 5.1. We're thinking about adding older UE4 versions, so please let us know (support@polygonflow.io or through our Discord) if that's something you'd want us to spend some time on!
GraphN Library
Tabs have been remade from scratch
The idea behind GNL is fairly simple: you open up a tool like Surface Scatter, and just like a web browser, that tool can then contain multiple tabs, each dedicated to specific things like grass scattering, pebbles scattering, etc... and of course each having its own set of properties.
Like with most web browsers, the tabs section can get cluttered pretty quickly. On the left, we have 8 tabs, but you wouldn't know it unless you knew that you could scroll in the highlighted section. The new approach shows you all the tabs in a popup, and gives the current one some much needed focus. You can give it long names, edit them, etc... We'll be adding a few more options to allow you to "freeze" specific tabs in case you don't want to update the grass tab for example.
Collections - Expose your most used properties in one place
Some tools in GraphN Library have a plethora of properties to give you as much control as possible. While this is ideal for you as an artist, it does make the tools cluttered at times when you find yourself mostly tweaking a few common properties.
This is where Collections come in: you can right click on any property, and "expose" it, making it easy to group only the properties you want, and keep the others away for those rare occasions where fine-grained control might be needed. Here's how it works:
The process is fairly simple: right-click on any property you want to expose to the Collections view, then click on "Expose to Collection". If you then switch to the Collections tab, you'll find all your exposed properties.
Additionally, going back and forth between your Collections view and the actual tool's view is just a click away.
Properties Grouping
Collections are all about condensing your crucial parameters into one neat view. But property grouping can also help reducing clutter without requiring a separate view, and that's exactly why they're in this update!
We'll be going through each individual GraphN Library tool in the coming weeks and neatly group all their properties to make them less overwhelming. This future update will include various improvements to our existing tools, so stay tuned for that as well!
GraphN
Node - Create Duplicates
GraphN currently ships with the node Create Instances, which allows you to instance geometry. But we were lacking a node to duplicate anything, from lights to curves and what have you. This is where the new node "Create Duplicates" comes into play:
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where special characters in the user preference paths was stopping the software from working.
- Fixed a bug in the core mesh libraries that caused a memory leak.
- Fixed a bug where the tools you used were not saved in the scene.
GraphN 1.0.1 - 2022-11-02
Added
- Added Unreal 5.1 (Preview 2) support.
Changed
- Opening a tool in GraphN Library now creates an instance of it, no need to manually click Add instance.
Fixed
- Fixed a bug where after installing using a non-admin account the tools are not shown in Maya/Unreal.
- Fixed a bug which caused slow project open times, as a result open is now 5 times faster.
- Fixed a bug which caused growing project file sizes after each save.
- Fixed a code generation bug with if-else/condition nodes.
- [GNL] Fixed an issue where passing curves as proximity didn't work if the curve did not have enough divisions.
- [GNL] Fixed a bug where objects added to a tool through tags didn't respond to object updates in the scene.
- [GNL] Fixed a bug where the convex hull tool had its normals reversed in Unreal Engine.
- [GNL] Fixed a bug where using a duplicated Actor in a tool in Unreal Engine did not trigger runtime updates.
