All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.
The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.
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The radius of the drone template object can be setup with the new "Drone radius" parameter before creating the first takeoff grid.
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Takeoff grid column spacing can be setup separately from row spacing, if needed. Takeoff grid parameters also got reorganized into basic and advanced groups.
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Fixed the "Stats" button in the formation panel so it does not throw an error any more.
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Improved the error message that appeared when trying to create a takeoff transition while online access is disabled in Blender.
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Added "End Frame" fields in the Storyboard and Light effects panels; these are editable and implicitly adjust the duration of the storyboard entry or light effect.
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Added basic support for translating the plugin into other languages.
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Added Chinese translation. Huge thanks to PeiYi on our Discord server for providing the translation!
- The add-on now respects the "Allow Online Access" setting from Blender when running on Blender 4.2 and later. You need to enable online access explicitly when using this add-on on Blender 4.2 and later.
- When selecting a start frame for the takeoff operation, the operator chooses in a way that it always falls between the first and the second formation.
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Proximity warnings are now restricted to above the minimum navigation threshold only by default. You can switch back to the old behaviour in the safety settings panel if needed.
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Proximity warnings can now be executed manually on all pairs of drones in the current frame by pressing a button in the Safety panel.
- The name of the custom function file and the name of the selected function are now copied correctly when duplicating a light effect with a custom function.
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Fixed a bug that was accidentally introduced in the transition calculation in version 3.4.1.
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Duplicating a light effect now uses numeric suffixes added to the original name, similarly to how Blender does it in its own code.
- Distances in the safety overlay are now shown with two decimal digits to cater for the needs of indoor shows.
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The add-on is now compatible with Blender 4.2 LTS.
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The constraints on the first storyboard entry now start at an influence of 1.0 when the start of the scene coincides with the first storyboard entry (which is the typical case). This makes it slightly harder to mess up the takeoff procedure by moving drones around manually before the first storyboard entry.
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Spatial constraints on light effects can now be inverted.
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"Inside the mesh" light effects now take mesh deformations into account. This may have a minor performance impact; if you experience slower-than-usual performance with scenes that have lots of "Inside the mesh" light effects, let us know.
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Light effects panel now shows which effects are active in the current frame.
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Safety warning overlays now use different colors for different types of safety warnings: red for proximity alerts (drones being too close), yellow for velocity alerts (drones moving too fast) and blue for altitude alerts (drones being too high or too low).
- Fixed a bug that prevented exported CSV formations from being re-imported into another project.
- Fixed a bug that sometimes resulted in a crash or out-of-memory errors when duplicating light effects.
- Copying light effects resulted in an error due to the newly added properties for selecting functions to use for coloring. A temporary fix has been introduced to restore the old functionality without copying the associated function.
- Smart RTH is not an experimental feature any more. Feel free to test it and report any issues that you run into while using smart RTH transitions, but note that the calculation is done on our servers and we reserve the right to make smart RTH transitions a feature for pro users only in the future.
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Fixed a problem with light effects when trying to index into a color image whose width or height was zero.
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Fixed a problem with repeated smart return-to-home transitions when the animation data of the previous smart RTH attempt was accidentally kept in the keyframes.
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Custom Python functions can now be used to create light effects that have not been possible so far. Thanks to @thomas-advantitge for the contribution! Talk to us on Discord in the #studio channel if you are interested in what the possibilities are.
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Yaw angles can now be exported into the
.skycshow format. -
Added multiple options for selecting a drone template before creating the swarm and the takeoff grid: sphere, cone (suitable for yaw control) or any custom selected object;
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Added support for exporting into Litebee format if the server supports it. Note that this is a proof-of-concept only; Litebee files generated by linearizing arbitrary Blender curves are usually too large to be handled by the Litebee drones.
- Minimum navigation altitude during export fixed for shows with staged landing
- The add-on is now compatible with Blender 4.0.0.
- Fixed the static CSV import option of the "Generate Markers" operator.
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Dropped support for Python <3.10.
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The add-on now declares that it needs at least Blender 3.3 LTS as this was the first version of Blender where the bundled Python was from the 3.10 series.
- The SVG formation generation got a new angle keyword that determines the maximum allowed change of angle at each path node to still treat the path around the node to be continuous.
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Smart RTH operation starting frame and duration is fixed.
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All operations of the "Generate Markers" dropdown list are treating the cursor position now as the origin of the generated marker positions.
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Fixed an issue with the ordering of drones in multi-stage landings.
This release introduces the concept of experimental features in the Blender plugin. Experimental features are hidden by default and you need to opt in explicitly in the add-on preferences dialog to use them. We reserve the right to change, disable or remove experimental features any time in future releases. Experimental features that prove to be successful will be finalized in later releases, at which point we will commit ourselves to keeping them for the foreseeable future.
Some experimental features may be converted to premium features when they are finalized and you will need to purchase a Pro license for the add-on to keep on using them.
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The plugin now supports takeoff grids where multiple drones occupy the same takeoff slot within safety distance (e.g., four drones in a pod at the same takeoff location). The takeoff, RTH and landing operators were redesigned to cater for dense takeoff grids.
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You can now import dynamic formations from a ZIP file containing CSV files, one per drone. See the documentation for more details about the format of the CSV file.
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Added support for creating a static formation from a QR code where each drone becomes a single dot in the QR code.
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The Formations panel now shows a warning if the selected formation does not have the same amount of markers as the number of drones in the show. This is because in this case we are not able to plan transitions into the formation as we would not know what to do with the missing/excess drones.
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Transitions can now be marked as locked. Keyframes corresponding to the locked transitions are never modified by transition recalculations.
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You can now tweak the departure and arrival times of individual drones within a transition with schedule overrides. This can be used to resolve collisions during a staggered transition manually, or to manually create more complex transition patterns.
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The Export panel now has a button that can be used to query the server about any additional supported file formats besides .skyc and CSV. Additional export operators will appear for third-party file formats if the server supports them. Note that the community server still supports .skyc and CSV only. Contact us for local deployments of the server with support for third-party file formats if you are interested.
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Return-to-home can now be performed in a way that every single drone lands in the same spot where it took off from, at the expense of a more complicated trajectory and a slightly increased time needed to land the entire swarm safely. This is an experimental feature.
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Besides the one dimensional color ramp, a two dimensional color image can also be used as the base color space of light effects to be mapped onto the drones with the desired output mapping. In case of color images, both dimensions / axes can accept any output mapping type. Along with that feature, a new light effect output type called
INDEXED_BY_FORMATIONis also available, which orders the drones according to the order of markers in the formation of the storyboard entry of a given frame.
- View scaling setting from the Blender preferences is now taken into account properly when drawing overlays on the 3D view.
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An "Export validation report" button is now available on the Export tab on the Safety & Export panel to be able to create a detailed safety report of the show in PDF format. This feature is available for Pro users only.
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Timeline markers are now exported to the .skyc files and to the .pdf validation report also.
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The LED panel now contains a slider to adjust the emission strength of the materials of all the drones. This can be used to make the drones brighter for pre-visualisation purposes.
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Light effects can now be blended using several commonly used blend modes (normal, multiply, overlay, screen, soft light, hard light and so on).
- CSV export was moved to the server side to allow us to fix issues with the CSV exporter more easily.
- CSV export now supports shows with dynamic light effects; earlier versions exported only the base color of each drone with the keyframed animations, but not the dynamic light effects.
- Gradient and distance-based light effects can now operate in "ordered" and "proportional" mode. In the legacy "ordered" mode, drones are sorted first based on their coordinates or distances, and then they are distributed evenly along the color ramp. In the new "proportional" mode, the drones are distributed along the color ramp in a way that their distances on the color ramp are proportional to their distances or coordinates in the scene itself.
- Fixed resizing handle of the main list in the Light Effects panel.
- Fixed a bug in the
.skycexport process that resulted in incorrect altitude and proximity thresholds saved into the generated.skycfile. (The "Validate Trajectories" button was unaffected).
- Randomness property of light effects is now animatable.
- "Update Time Markers" operator will not remove markers created manually by the user any more. (You need to execute the operator at least once first to trigger this new behaviour).
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Added a randomness slider to the Light effects panel, which can be used to spread out the drones on the color ramp of a light effect in a uniform manner. This is useful for creating sparks and other effects that depend on randomness.
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Added an option to limit a light effect in the Light effects panel to one side of an infinite plane. This is computationally less expensive than a full containment test.
- Running instances of Skybrush Viewer are now detected correctly on macOS even if the user is not connected to any network at all. (The issue may have affected Windows and/or Linux as well, but we encountered it on macOS).
- Added "Current formation or transition" as a possible option for the frame range when exporting.
- Vertex group based formations now work correctly even if the underlying mesh has modifiers. Before this patch, the modifiers were not taken into account when the positions of the vertices in the vertex group were sampled for a transition calculation.
- Fixed a bug in the .skyc trajectory export that sometimes resulted in overshoots during long segments when a drone was supposed to hover in place.
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Light effects can now be duplicated in the Light effects panel of the LEDs tab with a dedicated button.
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Velocity limits can now be different for descents and ascents.
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When a storyboard entry is removed, the plugin now removes all constraints related to the storyboard entry from the constraint stack of all drones.
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When a formation is removed completely, constraints between drones and storyboard entries referring to the removed formation are also removed.
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You can now configure the add-on to use a local instance of the Skybrush Studio server to run transition calculations and
.skycexports locally. -
When exporting to
.skyc, you can now choose to export lights and trajectories at different FPS. Typically, 4 or 5 fps for trajectories is enough, while lights can go all the way up to 24, 25 or 30 fps, depending on what you use in your project.
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CSV export button now automatically sets the extension of the output file to
.zipwhen the operator is invoked (unless the output filename is already specified). -
Dynamic light effects are now exported correctly in Blender 3.0 and above.
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Staggered transitions (i.e. transitions where drones depart and arrive with a pre-defined delay between consecutive drones).
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Formation reordering operators (needed to define the order of drones in staggered transitions).
- The plugin is now primarily released as a standard Blender add-on ZIP instead of a pre-compiled executable as the executable did not work reliably on Windows for some users.
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Fixed a bug that prevented the plugin from finding the shader node responsible for the color of the LED of the drone when Blender was used in a non-English locale.
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Fixed the placement of the safety check overlay in the upper left corner of the 3D view if the statistics overlay is also turned on.
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The safety check overlay is now hidden when the "Show Overlays" setting is turned off in the 3D view.
This is the release that serves as a basis for changelog entries above. Refer to the commit logs for changes affecting this version and earlier versions.