New year, new nodes in ArtEngine 2021.1

Kick off 2021 with powerful procedural tools that work alongside example-based AI superstar nodes.

Welcome to 2021 – and our first ArtEngine release of the year. While we’ve always had you covered when it comes to the example-based workflow, we’ve dedicated this past year to developing some powerful procedural nodes to augment your example-based toolkit and offer you the best of both worlds. Read on to discover some key highlights of new features and get a sneak peek of what’s to come.

Procedural power

We’re excited to launch our procedural toolkit with our new Pattern Array Node. By leveraging this node, you can quickly and efficiently create complex, seamless patterns of bitmaps or materials on huge canvases. You can also use it as a Scatter node to disperse bitmaps and materials in natural-looking formations.

New and improved nodes

Along with growing our family of procedural nodes, we made some major improvements and additions to our example-based node family, that include:

• A new Noise node: Add an extra touch of randomization by generating Gaussian, Cells, Crystals, Clouds or other noise profiles.
• A new Basic Shapes node: Produce your own basic shapes, then plug them into the Pattern Array node or use them as masks on other images.
• More realistic ambient lighting approximations: Enjoy more physically accurate results thanks to a new algorithm in the Ambient Occlusion node.
• Better normals: Leverage the Multi-Angle to Texture node with our Radial Compensation slider to generate better normal maps.
• Batch processing: Use our batching workflows to batch process thousands of files with a single click (available for ArtEngine Studio users only).

Next up: The fun stuff

2020 was all about tooling up, as ArtEngine officially joined the Unity family. This required us to spend significant time working on stability issues and migrating to the Unity licensing system – but we’re finally ready to take on the fun stuff. That’s why we’re so pumped to share our product roadmap for 2021. 

While you will see fewer releases, each one will be packed with more features. Here’s a sneak peek of one of our exciting features coming later this year. 

Introducing Style Transfer, a node that will let you capture the style of one image and apply it to another. Whether you want to replicate the vibe of your favorite 80s retro game, or snazz up your Unity scene with some Van Gogh-inspired visuals, we invite you to unleash your imagination and have some fun with AI! 

As our users continue to multiply, so does the wonderful art that you create. If you have any feedback for us, or are interested in having your artwork featured, please drop us a line at artengine-info@unity3d.com, on our Discord channel or the Unity Forum.

Try ArtEngine for free

Artist attributions: Victor Kam

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