JWildfire 3.20 release: point-cloud export

Just released JWildfire V3.20 – which is another community release, thanks to Brad, Rick and Luca for your contributions!

This is a major release featuring a new kind of mesh-export: point-clouds. Point-clouds basically are meshes with 1-point-polygons.
In contrast to the solid meshes, the “points” of the generated point-clouds may have also an individual color and an alpha channel
(which may be used in rendering).

3D-Packages like Houdini can render point-clouds in the way that each point is represented by a little sphere
(you usually can adjust the size of those spheres), generating a “solid” shape.
You can apply materials to point-clouds like to any regular mesh. Especially in Houdini, the points keep their individual
(diffuse) color.

You can also generate “solid” meshes from point-clouds, for example using the ball-pivoting-algorithm inside
MeshLab.

Important Parameters for point-cloud-generation in JWildfire (use “Output type” POINTCLOUD to enable it):

  • CELL-SIZE: the program uses an octree to quantize the space into little small cubes. All samples inside a cube
    are later condensed into one point of the point-cloud. So, this setting basically affects the
    “resolution” of the generated mesh. But beware, please make it only smaller in small steps,
    otherwise memory consumption may grow in an “explosive” way
  • RENDER QUALITY: overall number of samples, increase it only if your mesh has noise/holes in it
  • OUTPUT FORMAT: you may either use *.ply or *.obj. But beware, this option has also an impact on the generation
    of the point-cloud:

    • PLY-Format: only vertices (“points”), with color and alpha channel (works good for Houdini)
    • OBJ-Format: vertices and 1-point-polygons, NO color and NO alpha channel (works good for Lightwave Hypervoxels)

Complete list of changes (you can also see this list inside the program at the any time, see Help->List of changes ):

  • New “POINTCLOUD”-generator inside the Mesh-Generator.
  • New Variations – Thanks to dark-beam (Luca) and Brad Stefanov for conversions
    • Spirograph3D by Rick Sidwell.
    • Hypershift, Helicoid, Helix by Zy0rg.
    • Atan by FractalDesire.
    • Chunk, Erf, Erf3D, Gamma, XErf by zephyrtronium.
    • Circular, DSpherical, Shift by Tatyana Zabanova.
    • Circular2 by Tatyana Zabanova variables added by Brad Stefanov.
    • Pressure_wave by timothy-vincent.
  • Fixes
    • Fixed issue reading apo parameters in GlynnSim variations. By Rick Sidwell
    • Fix bug reading repeated variations in a transform. By Rick Sidwell
    • Added lgamma to Math.lib for gamma variation to work.
    • Fixed some performance problem in solid rendering
    • fixed a problem with calculation of normals in solid rendering

Just click the “Random flames” button to start playing around and have fun 🙂