Whats New - Version 5.5.0

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• Journalling
• RSL RfM Shaders
• Zero Length RSL Arrays
• Slim Parameter Hiding
• Slim Templates & Normal Differencing
• Slim Templates & RSL Arrays

Journalling

It is often necessary to save "backup" versions of a script while it is being developed. All too often such intermediate files are poorly organized and become a source of confusion and frustration. A journalling tool has been added to Cutter to help alleviate the need for a user to save backups of a script.

Figure 1 shows two new items that have been added to the File menu. The keyboard shortcuts Alt + J and Control + J can also be used to raise the dialog box shown in figure 2.

Figure 1

Figure 2

When the "Add to Journal" button is clicked the contents of the front window, or its currently selected text, are journalled by Cutter as a time-stamped HTML document. Journalled documents are organized into dated folders within a journal directory. For example, figure 3 shows the default director, "Cutter_Journal", containing three days of journalled files.

Figure 3

The index.html file shown above is a catalog of all the journalled files - figure 4.

Figure 4

Any notes entered into the "Notation" text field of the Jounal tool will appear at the head of the journalled HTML document. By default, Cutter saves its journalled documents in a directory named, "Cutter_Journal". However, the user can switch between multiple directories for their journals. In this way a user might have a python journal directory that is separate from, say, a Mel journal directory - figure 5.

Figure 5

Although Cutter does not provide a way of managing (deleting/renaming) a users time stamped (HTML) documents it should be noted that it does generate a "fresh" version of its index page each time a new journalled page is created. Therefore, a user can be confident the index page generated by Cutter accurately catalogs the contents of a journal directory.

RSL RfM Shaders

The parsing of RfM shaders has been improved. Several shaders have parameters of type "color" with default values of "Unknown". Cutter ignores "Unknown" and, instead, assigns such parameters a default of "rgb" [1 1 1].

Zero Length RSL Arrays

This version of Cutter now correctly parses the text returned by Pixar's sloinfo utility when a shader declares a zero length array.

Slim Parameter Hiding

Light source shaders often declare a string parameter named "__category". Slim files written by Cutter now have this parameter marked as "hidden".

Slim Templates & Normal Differencing

When a Slim Template file is generated from the source code of a displacement shader Cutter adds additional code to implement Steven May's technique of "hiding" polygon edges. Previous versions of Cutter set the "UseShadingNormals" parameter to OFF. It is now marked as ON.

Slim Templates & RSL Arrays

Slim version 7 has a bug that prevents arrays declared in the Slim templates files generated by previous versions of Cutter from being used by Slim. Slim collection blocks that previously used array syntax now specify their list of parameters (array elements) in a way that avoids the bug in the current version of Slim.