Strata Design 3D CX 6.2 Update

Strata Design 3D CX 6.2 Update / Mac
Platform: Mac OS X / File Size: 77.2 MB
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Strata Design 3D CX 6.2 Update / Windows
Platform: Windows / File Size: 54.4 MB
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Release Notes

Updater Requirements
You must have Strata Design 3D CX 6.x in order to update to version 6.2. This updater will also update the PDF import extensions and Strata 3D Vector plug-ins if these have been installed into Strata Design 3D CX 6.x.

What’s been fixed in 6.2:

Fixed a couple of crashers.
Fixed a file corruption issue caused indirectly by linking a spotlight to an object. Also files corrupted by this issue can be opened.
Fixed the flipped image issue when exporting the modeling window as an image.

XMM (Live 3D) file format improvements:

Added support for exporting textures with transparency and stencil maps.
Materials now handle the object two-sided setting.
Fixed issue with flipped images and image sizes. The exporter now looks at the size of the diffuse, opacity, and stencil maps to help determine what size of map to use when building the map from the texture.
Fixed issue where init script didn’t set sequences to a good state.
Fixed issue where Live 3D wanted UVs on all objects.
We no longer export nested sequences. All sequences are exported at the root level. The scripts exported will reference all the needed sequences directly.
Export will now use a minimum zoom view angle of 10 degrees. If the cameras view angle is less than 10 degrees then the cameras view angle will be the minimum zoom view angle.
Pivot points should be correct for most objects. However, all bets are off on objects with nested nodes.

Previous Release Notes

Strata Design 3D CX 6.1.2 Release Notes

What’s been fixed since 6.1.1:

New and improved Replicate dialog.
Collada import and export. Some fixes relating to the StrataCafe forum and beta list discussions.
OBJ import and export. Some fixes relating the the StrataCafe forum and beta list discussions.
Added back into the program, FBX import (Universal) support. We did this particularly for opening old files from CX 4.x that have OBJ entity types (OBJ imported objects that are dependent on the FBX functionality).
Added back support for opening old StudioPro 1.x files. Also updated to support Intel Macs.
Fix for OpenGL texture display problem. Description of issue: Texture(s) on an object displaying as a different texture when a selection was made.
Numerous other fixes encountered during the development process.
Fix for crashes when applying scale and rotation to spotlights and cameras.
Fix for issue with animated subdivided skeleton deformed meshes not updating properly.
Fix for Burn UV subdivided UVs distortion issue. Burn UV now does a better job of welding UVs and subdivision now checks for unwelded UVs.
Changed the default light total falloff distance to 1000 and set the default regular polygon sides count to 12. To have these changes take affect you may need to reset the Strata Design 3D CX 6 preferences.
1, 2, 3 keys on numeric keypad now working to select the move, rotate, and scale tools.
Image texture dialog – Default for secondary values in Diffuse and Ambient channels set to 100%.

Strata Design 3D CX 6.1.1 Release Notes

Poly Editor:

Fix for UVs being destroyed when using Connect.
Fix for scaling or flattening animated vertices. (Forum discussion: Jumping polygon points when scaling)
Fix for a dissolve issue.
Fix for some face selection issues when a face intersects with the front clipping plane.
Triangulating a polygon mesh in the polygon editor will now respect UVs.
Fix for edge selection issue.

General:

Made the Replicate dialog values persistent. Now the last set values are used for new documents.
Added an optimization to avoid processing collision geometry in scenes with no active particles.
Added an optimization for subdivision objects when the geometry is not animated. This could help some with pre-rolling.
Fixed a tolerance issue when exporting bezier objects to OBJ, Collada, XMM and when using the Photoshop plug-ins.
Fix for crasher when undoing adding an affect to spotlight or point light.
Fixed a copy/paste bug that could result in a bad merge of identical shapes and/or textures.
Fix for bad normals problem that was causing a hang in the raytrace renderer.
Fixed a Link undo crasher.

Hair:

Fixed a memory handling problem in the Hair FX shader.

Image Texture:

Fix for automatic updating of linked image maps.

Object Properties Palette:

Fix for object relative rotation in the transform tab.
Fix for rounding problem with too many fractional digits.

Rendering:

Fix for per-object radiance cache control.
Fixed a suspend rendering crash with stereo renderings.
Performance and quality improvements for blurry surfaces and the diffuse lighting cache.
Fix for an artifacting problem in raydiosity with blurred surfaces.
Improved performance when rendering scenes containing textures with animated values.
Further optimizations for raytraced volume shaders using shadow buffers on multi-core machines, with often dramatic speed ups.

Render Dialog:

Fix for the Draft slider setting rendering with similar results to Raytracing Better slider settings.

Subdivision:

Fix for Subdivided UVs issue when some faces don’t have UVs.
Fix for a distortion problem on UV seams and subdivided UVs.

Windows:

Some fixes to the Photoshop plug-ins, mainly for Windows systems.
Fix for the Window XP missing tools problem reported with CX 6.1.
Fix for popup menus on secondary monitors on Windows.
Fix for the customize menu dialog on Windows.
Fix for the Text tool on Windows giving a missing resource error.

Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard):

A fix to handle a boolean object display issue under Mac OS X 10.6.x.

Technical Support Notes

Default Folder
Default Folder is known to cause Strata Design 3D CX to crash. If Strata Design 3D CX is crashing and you are using Default Folder, you should turn off Default Folder and see if the crash goes away.

From St. Clair Software’s FAQ concerning this issue: “Default Folder X has been carefully designed and tested, but there is still a possibility that it may cause undesirable behavior or instability in an application. Fortunately, the robust design of Mac OS X isolates those effects to the application that is affected – Default Folder X cannot crash Mac OS X itself.

If you do encounter problems, please let us know at support@stclairsoft.com. We try our best to make sure that our products work seamlessly with the applications you need.”

Suspended Renderings
When moving suspended renderings that contain linked textures, be sure that the .RDF and linked texture files are all located in a common folder. Suspended renderings will not prompt for missing files, so make sure that all the needed files are placed with the .rdf file.

Illustrator
Illustrator CS3/CS4: When using Illustrator CS3 or CS4 to create 2D objects for use in Strata 3D, you need to select either the Media or Web template.

Project Window
Change in tabbing and clicking between text fields in the Project Window. When selected, an editable text field must have its value, changed or unchanged, committed using the tab or return/enter key. Once that field’s value has been committed, then the other text fields will become available for selection. Tabbing between fields is no longer available, you must mouse click to select the fields.

Strata Design 3D CX 6.1 Release Notes

Poly Editor:

Added support for cut, copy and paste in the poly mesh editor.
Added support for copying and pasting hard edges and vertices.
“Connect” vertices will now connect two vertices that don’t share a face.
Cut/Copy/Paste notes: These functions are mode relative. If you cut/copy in vertex mode only the selected vertices will be cut/copied/pasted. In edge mode, only edges are cut/copied/pasted, and in face mode, only faces. You can cut/copy in the poly mesh editor and then paste into the main modeling window. This will create a new object with the cut/copied elements. Pasting a cut/copy of just edges or vertices won’t be of much use outside of edit mode at the moment, they won’t be displayed in the main modeling window. However, you can select the pasted edges or points using the project window, and then take the edges or points into edit mode.
Paste notes: You can paste other object types into the poly mesh editor. They will be converted to a polymesh and pasted into the mesh being edited.
Connect Vertices: To allow for building faces in the poly mesh editor, you can now select two vertices that don’t share a face and connect them with an edge. You can then select a loop of edges and fill them to create a face.

Scripting:

ScriptFX are now available: Bounce, Heartbeat, Rotate, Shake and Smooth Motion.
ScriptFX notes: Some features that depend on animation paths may ignore the effect of ScriptFX, for example Align to Path, linked objects and Pixie Dust.

Subdivision:

Added support for Subdivided UVs.

General:

Fixed a bug that was hanging the rendering of a fountain model.
Changed the default camera shutter speed to 1/8th sec.
Fix for replicating and duplicating animated objects.
Collada fixes for importing some models.
Fixed a document file saving issue when the file is locked or not writable.
Change to avoid crashing when closing/quitting a rendering.
Fixed a bug when saving Quicktime formats with alpha when alpha wasn’t selected to be rendered.
Added an update checking mechanism.
Made the OBJ importer more lenient. If a bad face, UV face or normal face are encountered they are ignored.
Fix for incorrect texture color when importing a U3D (Enfold) file on PPC.
Fix for loading files with boolean objects older than 5.0.
Disabled project window snapping to other windows/palettes.
Fixed a potential crasher in the FX shaders.
Fixes for some thickness blowout issues.
Fix for an infinite loop in metaballs.
Fixes for normal relative function issues in poly edit mode.
Fixes in the Minicad importer.
Fixed the smooth slider crash in Import As 3D Mesh.
Changed the camera backdrop to save as a linked file if the backdrop is animating.
Turned off the camera up vector display for scripted paths.
On the Mac, fixed the modeling window title bar for models which haven’t been saved yet. Previously you could pull down a menu with a false path.

Bones:

Fixed the UI display limit of 20 with multi-bone in the Bone OP. The maximum number of segments is 99.
Fixed several crashes.
Made a change to make selecting bones easier.
Fixed a potential file corruption issue when saving a model with Bones.
Fixed issue where an IK target couldn’t be selected.
Added support for displaying vertex assignments for the selected bone.
Made it so that assigning a weight of zero will remove the selected vertices from the selected bone. To do this, select the vertices to remove, enter 0 in the weight field, and click “Add Selection”.

Convert:

Improved the welding of points when converting to polygon mesh.

Grids:

Fix for renaming grids.

Hair:

Fixed the hair shading bugs.

Image Texture:

Fix for an infinite key time (animation) bug with the image texture dialog. This was causing files to not open after saving, giving an alert that the file was corrupt.
Changed the bump slider range for 0 – 100% to 0 – 1000%.

Object Properties Palette:

OP Texture Panel:

Improved the handling of the texture palette zero size values. (INF size value issue).
Fixed the scrolling behavior of the texture palette list view. It should retain the current scroll position as changes are made.
Fix for the Object Properties palette not updating, if hidden, when a document is opened.

Particle FX:

Fix for pre-rolling of particle effects (Fountain, etc.).

Project Window:

Project Window – disallowed adding complexity attributes to lights and cameras.
Added option key support for project windows previews. Hold down the option key to preview from the current time position.

Rendering:

Fix for handling of very small objects in the raytracer. This avoids a particle fountain hang.
Fix for a potential raytracer lockup on bad data.
Fixed a raytrace rendering lockup.
Fix for stereo renderings crashing.

Render Dialog:

Fixed the rendering dialog percentage units issue with the constrain checkbox.
Added a tool tip explaining the reason for a disabled alpha channel checkbox in the rendering dialog.

Text:

Fix for text object font problems on Windows.

Windows Vista:

Fix for the window content display issue on Vista (blank spots in display.)

Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard):

Fixed the convert button crasher that showed up on Mac OS X 10.6.
Fixed the Mac OS X 10.6 movie playback problem.