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Release Notes

Pointools View 1.6 Pro Release Notes
build 1.6061030

Overview

This release adds a number of important features and fixes some issues with previous releases. A new draft renderer enables faster (up to 20x) rendering of animations with minor quality tradeoff. This is the perfect solution for when you want to render out quickly and used with motion blur can acheive very good results.

Movie rendering is also now more robust and allows use of a wider range of codecs, including the DivX codec (www.divx.com).

Snapshots can be now rendered in Piranesi's EPix format. Piranesi is a specialised '3D painting' tool, allowing you to start with a simple rendering of a 3D model, and quickly develop it into high quality images for presentation. See the Informatix website for more information on Piranesi.

We've also added a uniform spatial filter option on import of point cloud data. This allows you to filter the points on import to a uniform spacing, very useful in cases where density varies greatly due to overlapping scan data or data close to and further away from the scanner.

Support for the Faro scan format (.fls) and workspace files (fws) have also been added.

A more detail breakdown of the various additions, improvements and fixes follows below:


Key

>

Important Notice

+

New feature

-

Removed feature

*

Improved feature

#

Changed feature

!

Bug fix


Changed Feature List

+

Draft render added. Gives upto 20x faster rendering than the standard render
+

Faro fls and fws import

+

Proxy data shows point cloud position before data starts loading
+

Point cloud translation offset property
+

Uniform point sampling allows spatial uniform reduction of data on import
#

Clip box handles now work by click and drag. Use Alt to navigate.
*

Most codecs will now work with rendering including DivX
*

Improved clipbox performance
*

Updated User Guide
*

Interface improvements
*

Models render with textures in Snapshots and Movies
*

Movie rendering uses less memory
*

Importing / Exporting and Snapshot memory management improved
*

Larger snapshots possible with limited memory
*

Camera animation positioning is now in World coordinates
-

Camera animation in ortho not possible for now
!

No filename for render output causes a crash
!

First animation frame did not render correctly
!

Plane shader not working correctly with Clipping
!

Showing motion path sometimes crashed application
!

Exporting data was slow and did not index optimally
!

Network paths for models in ptl file not working
!

Improved stability when closing application
!

Incorrect links on evaluation box ( CD release only )
!

Other minor fixes

In future releases

We are continuing to develop and improve Pointools View Pro over the coming months. Some things you can expect to see are:

More powerful animation export capability including alpha and depth channel export for use in professional compositing applications.

Camera path import from other 3D animation applications to enable camera matching.

Post-processing filters to improve visual quality of movies (yes, they can get even better!)

Customisable user interface colours.

Multiple clip boxes.

Other stuff that we're keeping quite for now!


Got an idea?

Many features in our software have been developed as a direct result of feature requests from our users. So if you have a request you'd like to make please send it to support@pointools.com - you might get it sooner than you think.

 

Pointools Team
October 2006