What's New in Action

New Light Types

Action now supports additional light types. In addition to Point Lights and Spotlights, Action can now generate:

• Directional Lights
• Ambient Lights
• Area Lights

All of the light types have a Decay parameter that you can use to adjust the way the light intensity decreases with distance.

See Light Menu Settings.

Lens Flares

Action lights can now generate procedural lens flares with built-in 3D occlusions. You can add many texture components to your lens flares, such as irises, streaks, rings, and glows.

See Relighting: Lens Flares.

Improved FBX Support in Action

Smoke supports the 2012 FBX SDK, in sync with all Autodesk 3D applications. To ensure compatibility, all applications must use the same version of the FBX SDK.

The following FBX features are now preserved in Action:.

• Point lights, spotlights, area lights, ambient lights, directional lights.
• Shadow casting.
• Object ID and material assignments: they appear explicitly in the Action schematic.See Object Group and Material Nodes.
• Sub-materials are now exposed explicitly in the Action schematic whenever possible. Textures can be changed by any Action media. See Using Materials.
• Bezier animation curves.
• Geometry caching (mesh animation). See About Mesh Animation.

Material Node

The Material node creates a central hub to control the specular, ambient, diffuse, transparency, and shininess of a geometry's children maps and substances.

See Material Node.

Delaunay and Medial Axis Tessellation

Is it now possible to use Delaunay or Medial axis tessellation in 3D Text. See Changing Tessellation Properties.

New Action Node Bin Menu with Dynamic Tabs

The Action node bin is now located in a dedicated menu, and offers similar dynamic functionality as the Batch Node bin. It is possible to Add, Delete, Rename tabs and move nodes between them. It is also possible to Save and Load a Bin Layout.

See Using the Node Bin.

Adaptive Degradation

Settings are now available in the Preferences tab of the Action Setup menu to temporarily deactivate taxing operations during interactive manipulations. Full quality is restored upon pen up. The settings do not affect the final renders.

See Adaptive Degradation Settings.

Lens Distort

Image surfaces (including Stereo images) now features a Lens Distort submenu. Differences in camera lenses or perspective irregularities cause lens distortion that results in skewed angles. Use the Lens Distort settings to rectify or simulate these types of distortions in your images.

See Lens Distort Settings.

Camera Displacement

Camera Displace is a new option available in the Direction settings of the Displace Map object. This option forces the displacement to occur along the frustum of the camera you select. Surface polygons are extruded. The extrusion effect is only visible when seen through any camera but the displacement camera.

Z-Depth Output

You can now output a Z-Depth pass from Action. You can use the Z-Depth as an input for the new Depth Of Field Flame FX tool.