1.40 - Polish and Wax (Blender 3.5 Release)


It's nice to spend some time making a bigger Capsule release, and while there's no big feature changes (yet) a lot of time was spent refining what's already there. Hopefully this release will make things easier and more streamlined.

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Special Notes

Some Export Properties have moved around and been renamed in the Export Format menus. but all options from the previous version should still be present.

New Features


  • Object Exports can now include their children through a new "Child Objects" setting. This notably hasn't been added to Collection exports due to technical reasons but hopefully it will in a future release.
  • You can now filter through Export Lists using search terms, just like other Blender lists.
  • USDZ is now an available export option by using the new "USD Type" in the USD file format (thanks Blender 3.5 for adding this <3)
  • A new "Show Preferences Menu" button has been added to help you quickly get to Capsule's export presets (I wish I had added this earlier, whew!).

Enhancements

  • All Export Formats were updated to meet Blender 3.5 specifications.
  • Export Format options were combed through and rearranged to provide consistent groups and layouts, communicate function better and provide more warnings when potential issues will appear
  • All buttons now have icons and some previous icons have changed to better describe intent.
  • Lots of tooltips were rewritten to make more sense
  • Some of the terms for important functions and properties were changed to make them easier to understand
  • Added a few tutorial buttons to Stored Export Presets (the new name for Saved Export Presets) and Active Export Presets in order to make clear their purpose and how they are saved.
  • Everything in a Capsule release is now bundled into the Capsule folder itself making installation much simpler - no unzipping required.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue with Pie Menus that caused most of their operators to fail 🙊
  • Fixed an issue where an unselected Export Preset would be deleted when using the delete item function
  • Fixed an issue where "Clear Capsule Data" wasn't working (not a bug)
  • Fixed dumb behaviors with the "Reset Capsule Scene Data" operator, it now works across all scenes and resets all data

Future Features

There's two specific things I'm working on that I wasn't able to release with this version but hope to in the future:

Pack Scripts

A feature that lets you customize your export targets just how you want them before it's saved using a tiny Python script. Lots of people have pretty specific export workflow needs that no amount of in-built features could solve so this is a nice way of bridging that gap and keeping the required technical knowledge for users as low as possible.

The main thing preventing the release of this feature is the need to provide a safe testing environment for Pack Scripts in Blender so that you can play around with scripts and make sure they do what you expect them to, and while I've made some progress on this I wasn't able to complete it before the release of 1.4. You'll notice that there's a tick to enable Pack Scripts in the Addon Preferences but this should only be used by adventurous souls 👀

Performance Improvements

This becomes pretty important with large scenes. Capsule adds some overhead that is unavoidable but I have identified areas where the time Capsule takes doing things it needs to can be reduced and I need the time to test and implement ideas.

Files

Capsule-1.40.zip 726 kB
May 22, 2023

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