What's new in version 5
Version 5 is here, and it's a big one! Shaders written just for this plugin, HDR glow in VR, Fresnel rim glow, CUA glow drawn by EC itself, XRAY groups, style presets, even glow for patterns and more.
It's a
release candidate: if no major problems turn up, the beta label comes off.
◆ EC's Own Shaders: Way Faster!
Until now (v1–v3), Emissive Chimera relied on the emissive shader by Alazi and immyneedscake (borrowed via EmissiveClothingPlus). That foundational work made this plugin possible in the first place, allowing me to explore and experiment until I found the direction I wanted. I owe them immense gratitude.
The shader I was kindly allowed to borrow was not made for this plugin, and I did not have the skill to optimize EC to fit it, so a lot of the work ended up on the CPU.
In version 5, EC gets its own shaders, written just for this plugin. Body tessellation and material processing now happen right on the GPU, and the results are big:
- 17x faster mesh build, no more load spikes! The CPU hull calculations are gone. Mesh setup dropped from ~1,375 ms (68 frames) to ~80 ms (2 frames) on my PC. Loading scenes and switching characters is much smoother.
- Lighter XRAY! Drawing cost per frame is down about 30% (~0.25 → ~0.17-0.19 ms on my PC), and later work trimmed it further: empty scroll draws are skipped, and XRAY's per-frame CPU work is roughly halved. No more per-frame texture composites for scrolling.
- No clothing needed for skin rounding! Before, at least one clothing item had to be worn so EC could borrow its shader. Now the shader reads the skin directly, so Phong smoothing works even with nothing on.
- Pure see-through black! XRAY's see-through layer no longer picks up scene reflections (IBL). A clean, semi-transparent dark silhouette.
- Colour tools moved into the shader, plus a fix. Ignore Texture Color, Auto Source Levels and Scroll Mask now run in the shader, and levels finally apply when Ignore Texture Color is on.
◆ Even Glow for Patterns: Auto Source Levels → Uniform!
Some glowing patterns are drawn brighter in the middle, so with bloom the glow seems to start from the centre and the edges stay dim.
Auto Source Levels (a clothing material's Emissive settings) is now a choice of three:
- Off: the source texture as it is.
- Fit: what Auto Source Levels did before. It measures the texture and stretches its brightness range (a dark texture is lifted, a washed-out one gets contrast); the shading of the pattern stays.
- Uniform (new): evens the brightness out. Everything from Uniform Threshold × the texture's brightest point up glows fully, darker parts fade in proportion, so outlines stay smooth and the colours stay. The slider shows up only when Uniform is picked.
Scenes saved with Auto Source Levels on load as Fit, so they look the same.
◆ EC now does HDR glow in VR! (Experimental)
Brighter glow! More bloom!
In other words... it's STRONG!
(Even with it off, glow in VR is somewhat brighter in v5 - but it is still SDR.)
In VR, glow used to hit a ceiling. Two reasons: VaM's VR camera renders with HDR turned off (the desktop camera has it on), and EC cut glow strength back to 1 in VR. Version 5 breaks through both:
- Glow strength now works in VR. Anything above 1 (Alpha × Alpha Multiplier) used to be cut back to 1, so strong glows looked dim. Now VR reaches the same brightness as the desktop. Nothing changes on the desktop.
- VR HDR (Experimental). A new toggle in the XRAY tab, just above Show Troubleshooting, that turns HDR on for the VR camera. In my tests, PostFX Pro's glow and bloom got stronger in the headset, closer to the desktop; PostMagic's bloom looked the same either way. It is off by default, changes the whole VR view (not only EC's glow), and cost about 2% GPU time on my PC. It's remembered per PC, not per scene: once you turn it on, it stays on until you turn it off.
◆ Fresnel Rim Glow: Glowing Outlines!
Make the silhouette glow: surfaces seen edge-on light up, surfaces facing the camera stay calm. For clothing it's on the Emissive tab of a material's settings, for XRAY in a part's Emissive settings.
Fresnel Glow sets the strength and
Fresnel Power how thin the rim is. Two looks with
Fresnel Additive Mode:
- Off: the front goes dark and only the outlines and edges of the glow stay lit. It looks like a hologram or a wireframe!
- On: the rim is added in the glow colour. Turn the strength up with bloom on, and the rim flares into an aura!
Not available for CUAs.
◆ CUA Glow: Now Drawn by EC Itself!
New: CUA hair can glow! CUAs linked to the person, such as CUA hair worn with CUAManager, now show up in the CUA list. Before, only CUAs worn with CUAClothing were listed.
Until version 3, a glowing CUA had its materials swapped for VaM's glow shader, and its glow came from MK Glow (VaM's Glow). Now the CUA keeps its own look, and EC adds the glow with its own shaders:
- Looks just like the original! Gloss, transparency and shadows stay as they were. Glasses lenses stay see-through instead of turning into a white plate.
- Glows in its own texture colours! No more white haze. The halo now comes from your bloom (e.g. PostMagic or PostFX Pro); without bloom the surface still glows, just without a halo. Offset Color still adds a second glow on top.
- Custom Color repaints the CUA in the picked colour and keeps its shading and gloss (Use Original Color keeps the texture colours).
- Pulse and Hue Cycle run on the GPU: same look as before (Noise gives the same values), zero per-frame CPU work.
CUAs in saved scenes will look different. The glow can be subtler than before. To get closer to the old strength, raise Alpha Multiplier.
◆ XRAY Groups (Gp1 – Gp4): Change Many Areas at Once!
Tired of setting the same glow on arms, legs and torso one by one? Put skin areas into one of 4 groups. Press a Gp button above the XRAY list, tap the rows to add or remove them, and press the same Gp button again to finish. An area that joins takes over the group's settings, and from then on a change to any member changes them all. Grouped rows show their group name and colour.
◆ Six Built-in Styles: Pick One and Go!
The Preset list of a clothing material now opens with six ready-made styles (Cyber Circuit, Demon Flame, Celestial Holy, Toxic Biohazard, Cyber Glitch, Quiet Luminescence) and
[Default] Reset. They can't be overwritten or deleted. Loading any preset replaces that material's settings, so
Load Preset now asks for a second click, like Delete Preset.
◆ Smoother UI
- Tap anywhere on a row in the XRAY list to turn it on or off. In the Clothing and CUA lists, the first tap selects a material and opens its settings; tap it again to turn it on or off.
- Opening a material's settings no longer jumps around, and BACK takes you back to where you were in the list.
- The Gp buttons stay at the top while the list scrolls.
- Clicking a row in the CUA list now selects that CUA.
- Both lists share the same clear check badge, and a cyan bar marks every material whose settings you've changed, so you can see at a glance what you've touched.
- Text fields keep their text clear of the scrollbar.
◆ Slider Changes (please read if you have saved scenes!)
- Overlay Opacity now works over its whole range: before, everything from 0.5 up was fully opaque. The default is 0.5. Scenes saved with version 3 or earlier are not converted: their XRAY see-through layer now looks more transparent. To get the old look back, set Overlay Opacity (and a part's own Opacity) to about twice the old value.
- Scroll Speed U / V: ±5 (the useful part of the old ±10). Trail Width up to 0.5. Particle Glow and Overlay Glow: −1 to 50 (below −1 made no difference). Values saved outside a range still load.
Bug Fixes
- Copying, pasting, loading, saving or deleting a material preset no longer opens VaM's message log every time (turn on Enable Debug Log to see those messages).
- Changing Auto Source Levels or Texture Source (this material) in a clothing material's settings now takes effect right away. Before, the change only showed up after something else rebuilt the glow (for example reloading the scene).
- No stutter the first time a clothing item is selected.
- XRAY no longer disappears when the person stands far from the scene origin.
- XRAY colours (Glow, Scroll, Decal, particle and overlay colours) saved in a scene now load back. Before, they returned to their defaults every time the scene was loaded.
- A CUA worn with CUAClothing now shows up only in its owner's CUA list. Before, it was listed under every person's EC. In saved scenes, a CUA that was made to glow from another person's EC no longer glows; turn it on in its owner's EC instead.
- The CUA list no longer shows Emissive Chimera's own XRAY parts (rows named "Ext_UnknownBone_extraMeshes" with skin area names) as CUAs.
About version 4
Version 4 had a
big display bug, so I took it down the same day. Sorry to everyone who downloaded it. Version 5 fixes it and contains everything that was new in version 4, plus the fixes and the new feature above.
