Friday, July 12, 2024

v1.7.0 Blender 2.83 - 4.2

Tested on Blender: 4.2 (beta), 4.1, 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 2.93, 2.90, 2.83

Version support changes:
- Blender 4.2, while in beta, has been tested and confirmed working as of this release date
- Increased minimum support from Blender 2.80 to 2.83 (LTS)
Improvements
- Supporting the new convention for Poliigon textures
  - This is specifically for texture files named like: Poliigon_AssetName_8422_...
  - All assets will have multiple resolutions, saved into size-based subfolders e.g. 1K
  - Support for 512 and 256 pixel width assets, which may exist for some fine detail textures
  - Pre-existing textures over time will be migrated to this new format, including multiple sizes
  - Download and importing is limited to jpg, but we will be expanding extension preferences in the future
- New displacement options, accessible in the 'redo-last' popup bottom left of the 3D view after importing a material. This change is part addresses the duplicative encoded depth information that overlaps between the normal map and displacement map, which should not be used at the same time
  - Displacement options:
    - Normal Only: Only use the normal map for simulated bump surface details
    - Bump Only: Use the displacement map instead of the normal map for simulated bump surface details
    - Displacement and Bump: Use the displacement map for simulated bump surface details and physical displacement
    - Adaptive Displacement Only: The renamed option for Micro displacements which is otherwise unchanged from before - giving you pixel-perfect subdivisions to drive physical displacement
  - Previously set to zero, displacement is now auto assigned a generally appropriate strength of 0.05 for existing assets - but all new assets in the new format mentioned above will are assigned an exact depth of 0.2 to represent the intended 20cm displacement range to which materials are now standardized
  - Added a user preference option to also decide the default displacement method to use
- Show display name in the grid
- Generating assets for the Blender Asset Browser now automatically downloads missing thumbnails
- Automatically save Material X (mtlx) files to disk when downloading textures in the new convention
  - These files are not used for importing, but may be in the future as the convention is increasingly adopted
- Proactive support for Eevee next in Blender 4.2, as of the time of this release our new displacement methods also work in Eevee Next (other than adaptive displacement, which is only for cycles)
Fixes
- Fixed the notable issue of normal maps being disabled at the same time as displacement maps, leading to flat-looking textures like recent glass assets. The above displacement options resolve this issue.
- Fixed initial update checking in mention the update issues being fixed
- Prefer connecting alphamasked/BaseColorOpacity maps for color + transparency input instead of COL/BaseColor + MASK/Opacity maps, to save on the memory footprint of images during render