This release adds Kinect v2 support with body tracking and a skeleton-joint modifier, much faster SDF loading and editing, hotkey camera switching, a live control face on the MIDI Dashboard node, and a Theme operator that colors the app UI from a texture, along with over two hundred smaller changes since RC1 (including the RC2 dev release, which had no separate notes).
SDF compiles fast
SDF patches load faster and edits apply faster.
Fast Draft is the default engine on SDF Render, and a patch is on screen in seconds. An amber hint appears on the node only when draft mode is leaving out something the patch uses, such as shadows, AO, or volume mode. Export follows the toggle: what you see is what you export.
Lighting and feature edits apply without a rebuild of the whole scene, so they land much faster.
The app stays responsive while shaders build, and switching a Combine's mode or blend applies immediately.
A status pill in the viewport shows build progress, names the node being built, and gives an ETA for long bakes.
Depth of field no longer costs a second full scene render.
Elsewhere in SDF: the camera reaches parity with the surface camera (depth of field block, aim and focus ports, auto-rotate), saved patches remember the flown camera view, lights gain gradients, Hologram shading gets its own dials, Combine gains Edge Offset plus an Edge Color texture input, and Edge Glow can repeat.
Kinect
Kinect v2 (Xbox One) works alongside Azure Kinect: depth, color, and IR streams through the same operators, so a patch never needs to know which sensor is live.
Body tracking produces a segmentation mask and skeletons.
The Kinect Joint modifier drives any parameter from a body part. Pick one of 25 joints and an X, Y, or Z axis; values are meters in camera space, and the modifier holds its last value when the body leaves the frame.
Kinect SDF turns the live depth camera into marchable geometry, so a person can be combined, deformed, and lit like any SDF shape. A Pivot select makes transforms act through the capture rather than the sensor.
Smoothing Iterations now smooths the depth image without blurring the silhouette.
Multicam
Multicam and SDF Multicam hold five camera slots on hotkeys 2 through 6, and hotkey 1 returns to the free viewport, which remembers its framing. A switch flies to the target camera along the shortest arc, with smoothing amount and speed controls, and it works while playback is paused. The active slot is a real parameter, so MIDI, modifiers, and the timeline can cut cameras too.
MIDI Dashboard
The node draws its routed controls as a live face: knobs and faders visibly move as MIDI modulates them, and every control responds to drag, tap, and double-click reset right on the node. A grip resizes it, and an R button restores the default size.
Faders join knobs and pads, eight per bank.
Each control carries its own parameters and a right-click behavior menu, and one knob can map to several parameters at once.
Theme
Wire any texture into the new Theme operator and the app chrome samples it positionally: the top bar, palette, params panel, and timeline each pick up the color at their own screen position, as if the texture were projected across the window. Choose Accents or Full Takeover, set the update rate, and optionally give every slider its own sampled color. The node needs no path to the output; a dangling generator wired to Theme is a complete setup.
Node graph
Wire routing overhaul: wires exit straight out of the port face, run in separate lanes so they never sit on top of each other, jog around nodes they would cross, and wrap around the graph when running backward. Wires flow around a dragged node instead of popping.
Right-click and drag cuts wires. Nodes can be inserted into a wire from the output port side, and the insert search only offers operators legal at both ends. Hovering stacked wires shows a pill that picks out the one under the cursor.
Thumbnails fill the node body, ports spread evenly along the edges, and port names step outside while a thumbnail is on.
Collapse shrinks every node to its colored title bar, and it now round-trips: expand, work, collapse again, and the tight layout you built comes back. The Collapse, Dim, and 3D stats buttons sit together at the graph's top left.
Vertical align gains the smarts horizontal align already had, distribute is a dial, align uses fixed gaps, and pasting stacks in a neat column.
The grid is quieter, with a Grid Lines toggle in Settings, and the origin cross is back.
Parameters
Arithmetic in value boxes: type 100/3, 2^8, or (1+3)*0.5 and it evaluates.
Right-click any slider or value box to reset it to its default.
A scrub drag no longer stops at the screen edge, and the ladder sits directly over the value box.
Multi-edit: with several nodes of the same type selected, editing a parameter changes all of them, even inside a mixed selection.
New Constant and Null modifiers, and a wire drag can start straight from a modifier's inline bar. Drivers bypass parameter ranges globally.
Particles
The particle count cap is removed. Counts are now limited by the graphics hardware and a 2 GB memory budget, about 26.8 million particles. A request over the limit shows a warning with the applied count.
Color From Mesh: each particle takes the color of the spot it spawned on, sampled once at birth and kept for its lifetime, including on a live Kinect mesh.
Density coloring with a Contrast curve, and a Curl Advect effector.
Every effector gains a Particle Use Amount that limits it to a share of the particles; two effectors with the same amount act on different particles. Force effectors add Speed Variance and Speed Bias, and the Colorize effector gains a Blend Mode.
A Hide From Reflections toggle on the Particle System, an image emitter that distributes across the whole source image, and a hardened Volume spawn that recovers from failed loads.
3D and surfaces
Audio (FFT) deformer with five modes: Displace, Spectrum (a 128-band ribbon that turns the surface into a live EQ), Ripple, Wave, and Jitter, with custom frequency region controls.
Extrude Faces grows again: extruded side walls with per-axis subdivision and Merge Faces clustering, Thicken slabs, Across Seams, Random Hide, Shade Sides, Piece Direction, and field parenting with stage toggles.
Platonic solid primitives, and Merge Faces now works on triangulated meshes.
All three material operators take a Bump (Height) map, which composes over a Normal map, and Texture Displace gains a Fit mode.
Reflections improve across the board: live probe reflections, tighter ambient occlusion, dither-free screen-space reflections, and a post FXAA pass.
Object Origin can target the active camera, so a light can parent to whatever the viewer sees. Cloners nest grid-in-grid, and the audio effector's Band Sweep reads the full 128-band spectrum.
Viewport
The pop-out viewport is a full working viewport: camera drags, WASDQE flight, and hotkeys all work in it, and it drives the render resolution from its own window and monitor.
Flat Wire render mode: opaque faceted clay with polygon lines.
A scene stats toggle shows vertex, polygon, mesh, and particle counts. View hotkeys cover the orthographic pairs and a quad view, and axis views pan.
Transparency reads as a checkerboard on 2D panels, and the free camera fades the grid planes you sight down.
Media and operators
Image, Video, Webcam, NDI In, and Spout In gain a Wrap mode: Repeat, Mirror, Hold, or Transparent in the area added when fitting the source to the render size.
HDRI files show tonemapped thumbnails in the Resources panel, generated once and kept across sessions.
Blend carries the full set of blend modes and now leads blend searches.
Threshold gains Multiply to Source, and Fill Trace gains finer control over how a path traces in and out.
The top bar shows the current file name and its save status.
Timing and export
The global pause button now stops every simulation and node animation.
Exported videos play modifier motion at the correct speed at every frame rate. This fixes 60fps exports playing at double speed.
Fixes
From the bug sweep: the ASCII generator renders at default parameters, Billow's top octave renders and Octaves can be animated (every integer parameter animates correctly now), 3D Voronoi's Scale X and Y act on the pattern, the POI orb no longer covers modals or traps the pointer, floating panels cannot be dragged offscreen, the immersive params panel stays usable at every zoom, and Randomize only rolls values a plain drag can set.
The Gradient generator renders its default stops, starts static, and its Speed accumulates correctly.
A webcam that hangs while opening no longer blocks the camera you chose, and late-opening cameras are released.
HSV Adjust's saturation and value now change pixels.
Inline previews appear in saved patch images, and no longer make vectorizer outputs flicker.
Smooth Fly yaw eases the short way around, so a 360 degree keyframe loops cleanly.