Progress Update - March 2020 W01 (Patreon)

Hey all!

First of all, a big welcome to all of the newcomers, your support is much appreciated, and without it I would not be able to put nearly as much time into the project, so thank you ❤️!

Here's some quick general information about the procedure on this Patreon:

• Every tier is entitled to be in the Credits of Pragma, however it's an opt-in system (since I can't assume that everyone would just be okay with it). So, if you would like to have your name in the Credits, just send me a message on Patreon or Discord with the name of your choice (only ASCII-characters are allowed). The name will appear in the Credits-menu of Pragma, as well as the Credits-ticker at the bottom of the Filmmaker interface, and at the end of public videos I upload to YouTube.

• Patron++ tiers and above can also get a special preview key, which acts as DLC for Pragma. This preview-version includes some work-in-progress features that aren't complete yet and which are not included in the public beta (yet).

• Every Friday there is an update post with some information about the changes and new features I have been working on for that week, but occasionally I will also post some new stuff during the week in the VIP channel of the Discord server!

Anyway, this week I've mostly been working on a model catalog (shown in the video), which allows you to quickly preview and place models. It's not quite complete yet, but I think it should speed things up quite a bit when you're decorating a scene. Alternatively there's also the SFM-style option:

The different actor types in that list are mostly placeholders at the moment, but I should have some updates on that next week (especially for the light sources).

Additionally, I have finally managed to get GPU rendering for Cycles to work with CUDA, which means GPU rendering for Cycles is now fully integrated. I've published an update earlier this week, which already includes this option, however some people have had some artifact issues which I'm still looking into.

I've also added some quality preset options for Cycles, as well as an emission strength setting, which globally scales the intensity of emissions caused by emission maps:

A new update for the preview version should be available tomorrow, which will include the model catalog. An update for the public beta will most likely be available some time next week! I'm also planning on improving the support for Source 2 assets in preparation for Half-Life: Alyx / Source 2 over the weekend, but that's more of a side-priority.

Anyway, that's all for now! Thank you all again and have a great weekend 😊!