Welcome to this brand new version of NOVA. It will allows you to create, edit, share and publish your projects, products and conceptions all over the world in real time 3D, according to its complete toolset made by and for you, the end users. With the NOVA range of products, you see immediatly what you create, and you add "on the fly" all the interactions or changes you need. All that can add values to your projects, NOVA brings it to you with your own interface and build-in tools for your own and specific use.
What is new in NOVA 2010? Generalities
NOVA 2010 is a major version . This means that a lot of things have been entirely rebuild. The big thing is the DirectX10 provider that is now available. This brings you an unique rendering experience with the smoothest display. This allows to manage much more bigger 3d contents and very complex files.
The NOVA range of product with the DirectX10 capabilities is available for Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Windows 7. However, for older configurations, NOVA remains fully compatible with the DirectX 9.0c API.
We have also added a specific software DirectX 10 API, which renders full-quality DirectX10 scenes, without the need of a specific graphic board ( and without the performance requirement, of course).
The NOVA products are from now on fully 64 bits compatible. With the proper PC, you can now manage very large amounts of datas. Obviously, NOVA remains 32 bits compatible.
Of course, a complete source code cleaning and optimizing process was achieved, to bring the most usable experience, with a simplified interface for all the NOVA products.
Materials and shading
In order to take advantages from these two technologies, numerous aspects of NOVA have been refactored. Shaders for example. These ones can now be much more complex, with new effects (Fresnel shading, realt-time cubic reflections). The new opulence NOVA 2010 brings allows the user to create breath-taking materials.
The per pixel supports the fresnel shader for the diffuse, the reflection and the opcity texture channel. But you can also add a real-time mirror effet for the reflection texture channel. Or add a webcam capture to the diffuse map.
NOVA manages the IFL texture format, which is an easier process for the end-user to create animated textures (comparing that to the video texture embedding).
The NOVA Cartoon Material and the NOVA Fur Material have been deeply rewritten as the NOVA real time shadows engine. Dynamic shadowing have been made easier to create and much faster to render because of the DirectX 10 capabilities. For instance, Shadow volumes shadowing (also nammed Stencil Shadows) are now entirely assigned to the graphic board (geometry shader) for faster real-time response. We also gained a new shadow type, the Varince Shadow mapping which allows faster and smoother shadows.
Skinning, morphing ,space-warps, particles are assigned as well to the GPUs. Talking about particles, we have a new entry here : Soft particles ( particles can be faded as they come across a solid object).
New prediction tools have been deployed to improve the global framerate (occlusion queries and occlusion predicate).
Vortex
The real time dynamic engine that comes with NOVA (depending of the version) has also been improved. It now supports force fields behaviors, multi-threaded computation, a "re-factored" contact method, as well as a new approach of interaction among simple and animated objects.
NOVA Studio(formerly known as NOVA Explorer)and Nova Reader.
According to the NOVA philosophy, the NOVA Studio product is now much more simple. It gains a lot of new icons, and the interface have been redesigned. The user now have a quicker access to the desired tool. For example, the Design Mode gives you direct and natural access to all that concern the edition of the 3d content (objects, but also lights and cameras) in one contextual thumb.
The information pannel has been re-arranged.