FIVE DIGIT ANIMATION FRAME READOUT!!

Squid69, in one place it still shows three digits, but on the above graphic, you see five. I think I pulled a muscle when I saw it!

I detect no other changes in animation, so far. Probably no change in hair or cloth room. I don't care! They chose to implement only certain key changes and not go WAY over-ambitious. If they do this once every 12-18 months, that is a healthy attitude toware continuous, paced improvmement. Congratulations Curious Labs!

Here is my first guess about rendering. It is Firefly. They are committed to fire fly. Unless they have enabled the engine to take advantage of RAM more efficiently, I would guess there will be NO INTRINSIC improvement in render speed.

BUT (a BIG but!) there are some new tools in the firefly window. You can render shadows separately (shadow catcher). You have ambient occlusion and image-based lighting and point lights, which may very well reduce the need for "29-light dome arrays" and huge, heavy shadow map sizes, etc. And this little tidbit:

• Reuse loaded textures and shadow maps for faster rendering time

THAT COULD BE HUGE. If it means what it seems to mean, successive frames of animation would NOT have to render shadow map if somehow the program can be signalled that 'nothing has changed' on many shadows.

What I am saying is this: Firefly intrinsic render power, perhaps not changed. But new lighting and render features could help us LEARN to setup renders efficiently, leading to substantial improvement on render time.

I am very elated over this release, based on the little we can see so far. Very pleasantly suprised.

::::: Opera :::::