New developer releases : VulkanSceneGraph-1.1.3, vsgXchange-1.1.2, vsgQt-0.3.0, vsgImGui-0.3.0, vsgPoints-0.4.0 & vsgExamples-1.1.3

[vsg-dev]

Hi All,

Today I tagged developer releases for most of the vsg-dev projects, taking us significantly closer to the next stable release series which will be 1.2.x. Today's releases are:

• VulkanSceneGraph-1.1.3
• vsgXchange-1.1.2
• vsgQt-0.3.0
• vsgImGui-0.3.0
• vsgPoints-0.4.0
• vsgExamples-1.1.3

The VulkanSceneGraph has been evolving at a good rate since March's 1.1.2 release, with major additions of soft shadow, percentage closer soft shadows and spot light shadow support, greater flexibility for updating data, region of interest node for controlling things like shadows extents. I now have a Windows 11 machine set up for development so have even spent some time fixing VisualStudio warnings in vsgExamples!

As part of the work with expanding shadow capabilities we've moved all the vsg::Light and vsg::ShadowSettings classes into their own include/vsg/lighting directory, and to reflect this the vsglights and vsgshadows examples can now be found in vsgExamples/examples/lighting directory.

To illustrate a spot light with soft shadows, and enable use of vsg::RegionOfInterest in vsgshadows you can run like this:

vsgshadow -n 4 --soft 0.1 --roi

For more details about Chris Daklo's work on soft shadows have a look at this long thread on the development of the functionality: #1107.

For details on vsg::RegionOfInterest have look at this thread #1146.