Boxshot 5.0.1
31 Mar 2019
Here is the second beta of Boxshot 5 mostly focused on the new user interface theme. There are also fixes of the problems you reported and many small improvements here or there. More details inside…
New User Interface
As you may already noticed, Boxshot 5 comes with a new user interface theme. It is more modern, more condensed and different :)
This update slowly embraces the new design and most of the panels already have the new look:
Most of the parameters in version 5 have sliders for easier adjustment, but sometimes sliders are not convenient like in camera distance or target parameters above: the range is way too big to map it on a slider, as a single movement of the slider changes the parameter way too much. What we did is we mapped the most common ranges to sliders, but still allowed you to manually put a different number if you like. Simply click the number itself and edit it the way you need.
Here are some other numeric fields tricks:
- you can select the whole number by clicking the units symbol (if it is there);
- you can change the number by clicking it and scrolling the mouse wheel;
- you can also change the number with up/down arrows.
Some of the panels and most pop-up windows still have the old design. We’re working on that and everything should look the same pretty soon.
Scene Properties and Lighting
Panels at the left were re-arranged a bit and the old scene properties panel got split in two: the scene parameters and the lighting options. The latter also got the former easy-lighting tool which is now called sunlight:
There is a single panel to configure both environment (ambient) and direct (sun) lighting. You can set the color tint for both of them, adjust their parameters and everything else into one place. Of course you can still add those good old omni lights, if necessary.
The other panel got all the other scene-related options:
It is pretty much the same as version 4, except for the new “Environment” background option and some biased settings at the bottom.
New Materials
Another “big” change in version 5 has been done for materials. All the parameters were re-grouped into more obvious sections like “Reflection”, “Surface”, “Transparency” and so on. Not so obvious “Fresnel” option has been replaced with “Metallic” for the sake of simplicity. Some texture pickers have been grouped with the color tint selectors.
Reflection and refraction blur options have been combined into a single “Roughness” parameter, affecting the surface as a whole. Boxshot tries its best to handle materials made in version 4, but you may need to re-adjust them in rare cases.
What Has Been Fixed?
This update also fixes some of the issues of the previous version:
- invalid transparency of some opaque textures;
- invalid reflections at acute angles on complex shapes;
- slow bump processing in scenes that actively use it;
- crash related to bump processing;
- incorrect medium color processing in materials with offset bump;
- no dock/taskbar icon signaling when the rendering is done;
- production rendering window flickering.
Thank you for reporting this, please keep doing so - it really helps.
Anything Else?
A lot. I’ll keep showing the new features of version 5 in the next posts, but you are more than welcome to download it yourself, give it a try and see them right now!
Please keep testing the app and report anything that doesn’t work or could be done better. Your feedback is essential and helps us prioritize the development.
Thank you :)