What's New in MCG

CFD

Many new nodes and compounds have been added to load, parse, process, and visualize CFD data from CSV files. These form the basis of the new tools on the Create > AEC Objects > CFD Visualization menu (see Visualizing CFD Data). You can study and adapt the installed graphs to develop your own custom visualization tools.

Splines

Spline shapes are now supported. In addition to the new spline data type, there are many nodes and compounds for creating and manipulating splines with MCG. See Working with Splines.

Parameters

The following parameter types are available:
  • The Parameter: String node can be used to specify a character string in a tool's rollout.
  • The Parameter: Asset node can be used to specify an external data file, such as a bitmap, .vdb file, or CSV file. See Working with External Files in MCG.
  • The Parameter: Signal node provides a button to send a Boolean signal to the graph. This is particularly useful, for example, to allow users to force a static cache to update.
  • The Parameter: Colornode provides a color picker in a tool's rollout.

In addition, you can now specify default, minimum, and maximum values for Parameter: Vector3.

Rotations

The EulerFromQuaternion, EulerFromRotationMatrix, QuaternionFromEuler, and RotationMatrixFromEuler compounds make it easier to convert rotations between Euler angles and other representations. In addition, Vector3ToDegrees and Vector3ToRadians convert the units of vectors containing Euler angles.

Colors

New compounds in the Colors category allow you to convert RGB to HSL or HSV and back, and more.

Improved Sub-object Support

New nodes provide more possibilities for working with elements, edges, and other sub-objects. For example, MeshElements converts a mesh into an array of its mesh elements, and SplineElements converts a spline shape into an array of its spline elements.

Bitmap Support

There is improved support for bitmaps. You can now use LoadBitmapFromFile to read a bitmap directly in the graph, as well as GetPixels to get the pixel colors as an array of arrays of color values. In addition, you can use ConstructBitmap to define an array of arrays of colors with a function, and SaveBitmapToFile to write a bitmap to disk.

OpenVDB File Support

The nodes in the OpenVDB category let you read, write, and extract data from .vdb files.