Hi all,
I am happy to announce that I joined Epic Games Quixel as a Tech Artist. As such, I am releasing my Designer Plugin BWTools open source, along with a new update. I have put considerable effort into these tools, so am very happy they are now more accessible to folk.
So what's new in this version? The most notable change is a new plugin, BW Framer, designed to help with adjusting your frames and some improvements to the existing layout tools. There is also new documentation on a dedicated site and not tucked away in my artstation blog. Please take a look through if you plan to use the new version. Aside from this, the whole toolset have been rewritten to make the code cleaner for this open source release. If your interesting in learning Designer's API, check out the code on my GitHub.
Here's a more detailed breakdown of the changes and a link to the download
https://www.artstation.com/a/848543
General changes
- Replaced the top toolbar icon with a menu bar to access the tools. It now lives next to the Help menu.
- Moved all graph related tools to the graph view toolbar, which can be toggled on and off.
- It is no longer possible to run the tools on graph types currently unsupported by the Designer API. This was previously causing a crash with the latest release.
- Added more detailed tooltips.
New plugin BW Framer
Reframe a selection of nodes quickly and provide default settings for the frame. No more manually adjusting frames after moving your nodes.
BW Layout Tool Changes
- Considerable performance increase when running the layout tool. On average a 66x increase in performance. (102 seconds down to 1.6 seconds to run the tool on my test graph)
- The mainline feature (which pushed nodes back) is now toggleable.
- Added multiple layout styles.
- Added a snap to grid option
- Added option to run BW Straighten Connection after running the layout.
- Several bug fixes in layout behavior (the default behavior may be a little different in this release).
BW Optimize Changes
- Removed features which are now natively handled by Designer.
- Fixed a bug which would incorrectly identify some nodes as duplicates.
BW Straighten Connection Changes
- Now supports two different layout styles.
BW PBR Reference Changes
- Is now opened from the new menu bar.
- Removed custom color support in order to simplify the code for this release. The feature was barely used.
I want to thank everyone who had purchased the tools, your support is very much appreciated and if you purchased the tools in the last month, please dm me.