Tvori News

With this update, we are introducing advanced Puppet customization. It is now possible to change body proportions and create unique characters. You can find inspiration from 5 new customized puppet's on our Shelf and get an idea for what kind of characters you can create.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3Mk0Uw04Oo

This video shows how to change the proportions and work with brand new Puppet's Control Panel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqtB54IjB0w

Also, with the current update, you can export not only animation, 360 or 2D videos but also your complete VR experience! This is our very first version of the future Tvori Player!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYq7vMmnWWw

We updated the logic for locators. You can now use locator as additional control points for your puppet animation when a puppet is in the animation mode (Locked).
This should help a lot for facial animation, like eyes/eyebrows, animation of wings, fingers, etc. You are linking a locator to the required bone, Lock puppet for animation, and animate it as you used to do with existent control points.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p8HhptXbxQ




Puppet

• The functionality to change body proportions of puppets. Make elves, gnomes, and Slender men
  
• A control panel for puppets with a bunch of buttons that help to customize
  
• Optional controls for knees that you can enable from the control panel
  
• Locators in a puppet are always active now even when the puppet is locked for changes. It will be easier to make custom controls for facial animation and other features on puppets
  
• An ability to set a puppet in the T-pose with a single button click
  
• The IK system is more optimized now. You can have more puppets on a scene
  
• 5 customized puppets on the shelf to give you an idea what kind of characters you can make
  

VR Player

• Functionality to export scenes as dedicated VR experiences that exist in separate executable programs that you can run independently of Tvori
  
• Options to make a VR Player run in VR (Steam, Oculus) and in 2D
  

Tutorial

• The interactive tutorial now has more videos inside that should make it easier to understand how to do certain things that tutorial asks to do
  
• Tutorial has less internal errors that were interrupting people or making it not possible to complete the tutorial
  

Presentation in Play Views

• A switch between cameras and play views with left and right arrow keys
  
• When playing from a play view, pressing the left and right key switches you between other play views on a scene. Makes it possible to guide people in a presentation or a story
  

General improvements

• When you're in a play or record mode connections between objects are hidden
  
• Gizmos are faster now when selecting groups objects
  
• Link visualizations are more optimized now. When there's a lot of objects with lots of links Tvori should run faster than before
  

Play View
We significantly improved what was previously known as Play Area. Play View allows you to get immersed at an exact point and scale on a scene during play. It works in three modes now: Point, Standing Point, and Area.

— Point immerses you in the position and scale of the avatar figure.
— Standing Point does the same as Point but places your virtual head above the virtual floor at the distance of your real floor.
— Area positions you relative to the actual tracking area of your VR setup, where the center of your tracking area is the center inside the area of Play View.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=108&v=ZKG5nLgDFAg

Keyboard
We updated the keyboard, it's now possible to switch between upper and lower case, navigate the caret, and type in symbols aside from numbers and letters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1I_ImQx__I

Rename Saves
It's possible to rename saves while in Tvori now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmEdQqF21yQ

Texts on Scenes
It's possible to put texts on scenes and edit them via a keyboard now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whMp7W-JbBU

Tutorials
We made 2 interactive tutorials. The first tutorial will start once for every new user. The purpose is to teach people the basics of Tvori—how to interact with objects, how to animate, how to move on a scene, how to load scenes, and how to use some tools.

Transparent Materials
You can make objects semi-transparent through the color palette now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk1fZQuED4w

Semi-transparent Images (PNGs)
Import semi-transparent PNGs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPSnYNvTEfs



Fog
Set the fog material to any objects through the context menu. You can also change the color of the fog.

Snapping grid
When the snapping is on, a grid of dots visualizes the distance between snapping points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyB1-gYYX_w

All improvements and fixes with technical details
— Fixed when sometimes project doesn't load correctly after switching the projects from 2D menu
— Changed from 4096 to 8192 max import resolution
— Fixed problem with duplicating strokes (exception)
— Fixed visibility on the 360 image container other 360 image
— Play View. Switch between three modes: Point, Standing Point, and Area
— Save state of play targets (mode, UI)
— Add the 360-degree camera to the tools shelf
— 360 Photos. Inject Metadata (using exiftool)
— 360 Photos. Visualize 360 photos on the scenes
— 360 Photos. Visualize 360 photos on Shelf
— 360 Photos. Made loading faster and more reliable. Fixed situations when a 360 photo would turn black.
— Play View. Spawn 360 cameras through a context menu
— Enable Timeline->Export->Photo for play areas
— Improved Keyboard: upper/lower-case switch, new symbols, caret navigation
— Interactive tutorials—teaching the basics and working with the puppet
— Disallow throwing away the frozen/locked objects by trash bin
— Snapping grid visualization
— Improved the color palette
— Added a new fog material
— Added visualization of the snapping grid
— Made it possible to import PNGs with semi-transparency
— Created interactive tutorials

We are happy to invite everyone to participate in #Tvori360Time contest!
Create your story in VR and share as 360-degree video or create your atmospheric scene and share a panoramic 360 photo. Demonstrate the beauty of spacial views.

#Tvori360Time starts TODAY, February 14th 2019, and the submission deadline is March 14th 2019. Learn more about the contest.

https://youtu.be/l-rmurOZdLE

With this update, we focused on improving 360 output. We added a new 360 camera to Shelf that allows making 360 photos and videos. It's now more convenient to make 360 videos and possible to view 360 photos on scenes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFWWnJCyq-0

All the improvements and fixes:
— Camera. Made it possible to capture 360 photos
— Saving state of play targets (mode, UI)
— 360 Photos. Injects Metadata (using ExifTool) so the photo is getting recognized as panoramic 360 by viewers and websites such as Facebook
— 360 Photos. Visualizes 360 photos on scenes. See details in the note
— Possible to switch from a regular to 360 camera through a tab on Timeline
— Improved the precision of Locker
— Fixed the problem when it was possible to unlink/re-link some body parts of the body even if the puppet was locked
— Fixed random exceptions when colorizing objects
— Switches off LODs on Shelf
— Fixed the problem when projects were created with "low" quality settings
— Fixed detection of some models as form Poly, that wasn't from Poly
— Made it possible to save the One Hand Rotation mode to the settings when you switch to that mode in VR
— Made it possible to rename scenes
— Improved the layout of Menu

Duplication of animations
With the new update, you can animate a puppet, duplicate it and the duplicated puppet will have all the animations intact. This also includes duplication of an object that has other objects linked with animations—animations in those objects will be duplicated with the objects as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-mLUeBhH6I

Level of Detail
The following feature might be useful for those who have scenes with a large amount of high-poly models and want to improve the performance in those scenes. It would also require a basic knowledge of 3D editing software.


Now you can import models with a level of detail. Level of detail or LOD involves decreasing the complexity of a 3D model representation as it moves away from the viewer. In short, it makes real-time rendering more performant and will help you to make high-fidelity, optimized scenes in Tvori. For example, you can sculpt something in Medium or Masterpiece, set up LOD for that sculpt and then import it to Tvori—up close that sculpt will be quite detailed but won't affect the performance as much. Learn how to set up LODs.

This is the first iteration of the feature. Ideally, in the further iterations, this kind of optimization should be performed automatically.

Starting & Loading Screen
We updated the starting screen and the loading indicator. Now, when a scene is loading or you're exporting something it will be clearly indicated in VR and on the desktop screen. We fixed visual glitches and screen freezes when going from one scene to another.

Switching Between Projects
The 2D menu now will be storing the paths to the last 5 opened projects making it faster to switch between the projects.

Quality Settings
The 2D menu now also allows switching between quality levels, so if you feel like the performance isn't good you can switch to the lowest quality that disables shadows and decreases detalization of models with LODs.

All Improvements & Fixes of the Update
Duplication of Animations
Support of LODs in Tvori
New starting screen
Improved loading Indication
Showing the list the last 5 opened projects in 2D menu
Exporting rotation of the sun in FBX & Alembic when exporting the whole scene
Photo spawned from the camera on a scene is undoable
Improve scaling controls on the fog
Fixed switching back pages on Poly shelf
Renamed "up to button" from "root" to "Stuff" (on the import shelf)
Renamed some assets from the shelf
Added a sphere with inverted faces to the shelf in Primitive pack. For example, it`s might be useful for cartoon eyes.
Now an exported Alembic file will contain transforms of light sources