Brekel MeshCache Studio changelog

v1.00

First official non-beta release - thanks to everyone who tested through the beta cycle!

Fixed slow thread-handle accumulation across many file loads in a single session
Hardened sequence loader’s frame-request cleanup against cancellation edge cases
Hardened OBJ parser’s index reader against signed-integer overflow on extreme values
Reduced worker-thread contention when loading legacy HDF5 Alembic files
Minor cleanup in crop-volume mesh-filter path
Removed VAT (Vertex Animation Texture) export for now. The game engine side ecosystem proved too unreliable (may return in a future release)

Added Translation & Rotation (X / Y / Z) to the Mesh Transform panel alongside the existing Uniform Scale
- Applies both to the 3D viewport display and is baked into mesh exports (all formats)
- Also available headless via a new --rotation X,Y,Z CLI flag
Added “Solid Floor” toggle - ground plane writes depth and clips meshes below it (useful for checking foot penetration / floating)
Added “Off” toggle to the Crop Volume gizmo - hides the translate/rotate/scale handles for an uncluttered viewport (tap the active mode key T/R/S again to toggle off from the keyboard)
Added current frame number to the HUD (visible during live playback and burned into exported video when HUD is enabled)
Added “Render Annotations” option to Export Video - camera smoothly glides between saved annotation viewpoints; strokes appear on each annotation frame
Fixed annotation state not initializing on frame 0 after loading a sequence
Fixed issue with annotation not dissapearing from 3D viewport after delete until first refresh
Inter-Frame Interpolation now defaults to Catmull-Rom instead of Linear for fresh installs
Camera Tracking now defaults to 100% for fresh installs
Cache now defaults to half the avaialble RAM in the machine for fresh installs
Cleaned up and compacted GUI a bit
Sped up video export - encoder now runs on a worker thread alongside rendering, and skipped a per-pixel format conversion
Presets are no longer re-created if user deliberately deleted them from the folder

Added Crop Volumes - clean up volumetric-video noise (capture-rig walls, floor, stray geometry) without round-tripping through Houdini or Blender
- Box, cylinder, and sphere volumes
- Each can be set to “keep inside” or “keep outside” (subtractive)
- Multiple volumes combine as a union
- In-viewport gizmo with translate (T), rotate (R), and scale (S) handles
- Numerically values in the Crop Volumes panel
- Settings auto-save next to the sequence as a .crop.json sidecar and reload automatically when the sequence is opened again
Crop volumes apply during mesh export to OBJ, PLY, Alembic, and USD
Export to PC2 / MDD / VAT is blocked when a crop is active (as cropping produces varying topology per frame, which fixed-topology formats can’t store)

Fixed Velocity Heatmap: removed flicker on playback loop and stale colors when scrubbing; sensitivity slider is now scene-relative so the same value works across caches at any scale
Fixed duplicate log lines when loading Alembic files (one line was incorrectly emitted per worker thread)
Fixed log panel scrolling: latest messages now always appear at the bottom
Fixed crash with Onion Skin bug that could occasionally happen on Windows
Fixed potential crash at shutdown while still loading a file
Added Settings Presets panel: save, load, rename, delete, import, and export named snapshots of your settings
- Presets are categorized (Viewport, Colors, Lighting, Post-FX, Mesh Transform, Texture, Export) - apply only the categories you need without touching the rest
- Per-file preset auto-load: link a preset to a specific file so it applies automatically each time that file is opened
- Replaced “Save Settings Per MeshCache File” checkbox with the clearer per-file preset linking in the Presets panel

Added an Onion-Skin effect that allows displaying ghosts of previous/future frames
Added a Motion-Blur shader (based on motion vectors and post blurring)
All sliders in the GUI now also have an accompanying numeric input and vice versa
Removed Shade sliter from colors in GUI and consolidated into Fill light for simpler controls
Moved post-processing shaders to their own groupboxes
“Reset Settings” no longer collapses disabled groupboxes

Speed improvements in Alembic loader (especially Ogawa variant)
Speed improvements in USD loader
Anti-Aliasing setting can now be switched at runtime
Depth of Field shader now works when Anti-Aliasing is enabled
Fixed UV Texture not updating when switching to an image sequence or video after a cache was already loaded
Added option to save settings on a per-file basis or globally when disabled
Added toggle to show/hide annotation drawings
Annotations now draw with a subtle drop shadow so they stand out a bit better
Existing annotations can now be edited
Updated incorrect download link to: https://brekel.com/meshcache-studio-beta-downloads (please open this link manually when updating from v0.70)