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[wallworm]

There is a change to displacements coming this week that has a drastic affect on how sculpt meshes work. This update brings performance boosts (faster creation of sculpt meshes and faster commit-times). But as of the new release, sculpt meshes will always be triangulated. Furthermore, you will no longer be able to use the Graphite Modeling Tools Quadrify function on sculpt meshes--if you do this with new sculpt meshes after this update, the sculpt mesh will be corrupt!

Being able to edit displacements as quads has benefits (especially for selecting edges and faces) but the performance improvements were imperative for some of the things I'm working on. So I'm posting this information ahead of the update so that the word gets out. I'll post more details with the next release.

[Joris Ceoen]

Cool! Will this update triangulate displacements in existing scenes automatically?

[wallworm]

No, it won't. Existing sculpt meshes will still work fine without triangulation. But all new ones will no longer allow non-triangulation via the Quadrify command.

[wallworm]

Just an update on the upcoming displacement changes. When this update happens, existing displacements will not actually be compatible with future sculpt meshes. Displacements in current scenes will continue to work and export into Source, but they will not be able to be converted to sculpt meshes after the next update to WW.

I've tried to get around all of this, but I'm getting to the end of my adventures in this update and cannot solve the issue. The new displacement system will be much faster than before... but...

Existing Scenes will Have these limitations after the pending update:

1) Custom Attributes for Displacements and Sculpt Meshes will not be updated to the latest versions
2) Displacements will not be able to be converted into Sculpt Meshes

Again, this is dealing with existing displacements in existing scenes. You will be able to continue to use and edit displacements from old scenes. But it does mean that if you revert a legacy sculpt mesh to it's displacement parts, those parts cannot be added back to a new sculpt mesh.

New Displacements and sculpt meshes created after the update will not be limited.

[wallworm]

There will be another update to displacement sculpt meshes this week that will speed up the Commit process to negligible times. That update will be limited to WW Pro as it uses a bunch of the WW Pro DLL functions.