Slice system updates and NVIDIA Cloth Gem arrive in Lumberyard Beta 1.23 – Available Now

Today we’re excited to release Lumberyard Beta 1.23, featuring over 40 stability and performance improvements. Some highlights include the addition of cloth physics, EMotion FX improvements, and ease of use updates to the slice system. Let’s take a closer look:

Experimental NVIDIA Cloth Gem – The NVIDIA Cloth Gem allows customers to add both, environmental and character cloth into Lumberyard with an easy and intuitive workflow. The gem uses the NVIDIA Cloth library to provide fast and robust cloth simulation in Lumberyard.

Slice system updates – A slice is a collection of configured entities that is stored as a single unit in a reusable asset. With Lumberyard 1.23, we’re making slice assets human readable (and merge-able). This will make debugging easier and enable asynchronous collaboration on slice assets. We’ve also added conversion capabilities for name and type changes for slice overrides. When component data needs to change, it is now possible to migrate data with a single line of code. We have updated documentation on these improvements here.

Key performance improvements to EMotion FX – EMotion FX is Lumberyard’s character animation system. With this update, we’ve made optimizations inside the EMotion FX runtime in a continuous effort to improve its runtime performance. We’ve also made performance improvements to the Pose class implementation and to animation graph resolution. Additionally, we’ve added a new FBX settings modifier for Actors which will lead to improved performance, especially when you have multiple animated Actors in a scene.

To learn more about Lumberyard 1.23, you can read the full release notes here.

You can download Lumberyard 1.23 here.

Other links:

Lumberyard tutorials – To help you get started and learn more about Lumberyard, we’re continually making updates to our tutorials.

Lumberyard on GitHub – Full source is available there, as well as the ability to contribute back to Lumberyard.

Lumberyard forums – As always, we want to hear from you. We’ve launched the new forums so you can get in touch with us, send us your feedback, and interact with the Lumberyard community there.