NURA #

Our new NURA Render Engine now consolidates all the necessary components for rendering a scene into a range of Renderer Nodes. Lighting and Material behaviour are unified across all four Renderers, enabling seamless switching between them. This allows for rapid adaptations to client changes and the delivery of high-quality results at any scale. Our Renderers come in four flavours:

• Path Tracer, Our native GPU-powered path tracer, for pixel perfect renders.
• Smart Tracer, Our accelerated Path tracer, built on the latest raytracing research.
• Hybrid Renderer, Our high quality real-time renderer, with all the bells and whistles for live performances.
• Standard Renderer, Our hyper fast renderer, built to balance speed and quality.

For more on NURA, check out our deep dive on the topic.

Nodegraph Advancements #

The Nodegraph has been substantially updated, with brand new node designs and quality of life improvements.

• Embeds allow you to compact complex setups into groups, and is a stepping stone towards Assets.
• Auto-Alignment makes the chore of tidying a Nodegraph a breeze, with easy snapping and preset arrangements to make your nodes readable again.
• Floating Search and Floating Find make it easy to find and add new nodes to the Nodegraph in context.
• Clusters and Hints suggest nodes that you might want to connect as you create, for even speedier project building.

Timeline & Curves #

The Timeline and Curves have received huge facelifts, cleaning up their respective UIs and adding some key features for much easier editing.

• Streamlined Bezier Curves allows for a much greater level of control over keyframes, and a much more advanced workflow.
• Transform Tools allow you to tweak existing curves and time segments within a specified region.
• Overlaid View allow you to simultaneously see curves of different magnitudes.
• Timeline Pinning helps you focus on the key nodes you want to work on by hiding all nodes except those you want to see.
• Timeline Curves allow you to do advanced keyframe editing in the timeline without having to switch focus.

Overhauled Fields System #

The re-written Field System allows for vastly more detailed and physically larger simulations with fewer bounding box constraints, suitable for both real-time use and high-quality offline rendering. Fields are also fully integrated with the rest of the Notch tool set, so not only are they completely supported by all the new renderers, but can even be used to affect and drive other systems.

Assets #

Package and share your nodes as an Asset, with the ability to expose internal parameters directly to the property editor. This allows artists to share control over the Assets inner workings, from a simplified context. The result are dynamic, versatile building blocks that can be seamlessly shared across projects and teams.

For more on Assets, check out our page on the topic.

Material & Asset Library #

Notch now includes a Library of off-the-shelf materials covering all the major bases: concretes, plastics, paints, stone, wood, metals and much more. Many of the materials are procedurally generated, providing huge scope for adaptation and tweaking. Mock up your creations quickly with an off the shelf library of the most common materials you’ll need.

Resource Inspector #

Preview, rotate, scale, flip, intelligently flatten & trim your 3D, textures and videos in the all new Resource Inspector, before you bring them into your Nodegraph. Keep your nodegraphs cleaner and less complex by clearing up the resource on import.

Deformers & Shading #

Deformers and Shading Nodes have seen significant expansions and redesigns making them more capable than ever. The new deformer nodes provide many features directly in Builder which previously had to be done within a third party modelling tool and cached out (such as Voronoi Fracture). Along side this, Shading Nodes has been redesigned, with a new set of nodes and workflow that greatly expands the feature set. Complex material shaders can now be easily built fully inside Notch, with fine-grained control of material shading at a pixel level.

Viewport Tools #

The new Viewport Tools bring greater interactivity and feedback to the viewport, with new tools and new features to make working in your scene even easier.

• Viewport HUD, presenting important metadata about your scene at a glance in the viewport.
• Greatly improved Handles make orienting and placing objects in your scene significantly easier.
• The brand new Placement Tool allows you to place objects directly onto surfaces easily.
• Some of the new nodes have unique viewport controls, to make them much more intuitive and easier to work with.
  • Clone Painter, can place clones directly in the viewport onto the surfaces in your scene.
  • Splines, can now be built using custom spline points, including adding new points, adjusting tangents, and even mixing between broken, aligned and mirror tangents.

ACES & Colour Management #

For those requiring wide colour gamut, v1.0 brings ACES workflows to both offline rendered content and Notch Blocks. Import & export conversions are handled to a range of colour spaces. Meet the clients Colour Space and HDR requirements. Exploit the latest LED and Projector technologies in both Blocks and rendered content.

For more on Colour Spaces and Colour Management, check out our deep dive on the topic.