Kreate v0.3.1

Added

• A robot read from a URDF can be posed with an armature: Object ▸ Parent ▸
  Make Armature from Robot (or Make Armature in the Robot panel) puts a bone
  at every joint that moves, standing on the joint's axis and held to its
  limits, with an effector and an IK target at the end of each arm. Turn the
  bones in pose mode, or switch the IK on and drag the target, and the robot
  follows; key the bones and it plays, and writes to glTF moving. The Robot
  panel's sliders and the bones stay in step either way, mimic joints
  included, and the URDF written out is the robot as before.

• IK honours a bone's Limit Rotation: a bone held to turning about its own Z
  turns only that way, within its range, while the chain reaches.

• A Limit Location bone constraint, for a slider's travel.

• Objects can hang from a bone (Ctrl+P ▸ Bone, Blender's Bone parent): they
  move with it rigidly, as they are, and keep doing so through saving, undo,
  copy and paste, and glTF export.

• Reading a large file shows what it is doing: a card over the viewport with
  the stage, how far through it, how long it has taken, and Cancel. Opening a
  scene file no longer freezes the window while it reads.

• STEP files (.step, .stp) open and import: solids and surfaces from any
  CAD program — planes, cylinders, cones, spheres, tori and splines — cut
  into triangles that follow the true shape, watertight where the part is.
  An assembly comes in as its parts, each placed where the assembly puts it
  and shared between its copies, with the file's colours as materials and
  its own unit (millimetres, inches) honoured. STEP export was already there.

• An Assets editor: models, materials and HDRIs from your own folders or
  from Poly Haven (CC0), searchable, with pictures. A model is added to the
  scene, a material is made of its maps and put on the active object, an
  HDRI lights the world. Downloads are kept in the cache for next time.

• FBX characters come in rigged and moving: a skin's bones and weights
  become an armature, and each take — Mixamo's dance, a walk — an action,
  the first playing and the rest as muted strips. Meshes sharing one
  skeleton share one armature, and the bones nothing is weighted to (a
  fingertip, an eye) are bones too.

• The connector's asset tools see and place: search_assets can return the
  first six's pictures, to choose by looking, and searches no longer hold
  up the window; add_asset takes where a model's base goes and how tall
  it should be, and with wait answers once it has landed with what was
  added, where and how big.

• The connector teaches its ways of working: its instructions now say when
  to reach for assets, AI generation, the sculpting loop (compare, shape,
  measure again), the rigging loop and the timeline; and it offers them as
  prompts — rig a character, sculpt to a reference, dress a scene from
  assets, make a model — for a client to start from.

• The connector's check_proportions measures a standing figure against a
  realistic adult — heads tall, leg length, arm span, chest and hip width —
  each with the usual range and whether it is below, within or above.

• The connector's compare_silhouette sets the model's outline from a side
  against a reference picture's — concept art, a photo — at one height and
  where they overlap most, and says how much they agree, their proportions,
  where the model has too much or too little, and shows it in red and blue.

• Detail from a picture: sculpt.displace_image raises and lowers the
  surface by a height map, through its UVs or projected from three sides,
  so many millimetres, round one place or all over; and the connector's
  generate_height_map draws one — skin, scales, bark — with AI, made
  level and seamless by Kreate.

• Sculpting by number: sculpt.deform_region pushes, swells, moves,
  scales, flattens or smooths a ball- or egg-shaped region by so many
  millimetres, fading to its rim, mirrored across X if asked and held by the
  mask; sculpt.crease_path carves a groove or raises a ridge along a path
  of points. What an assistant sculpts with.

• The connector's analyze_mesh reads a mesh as a sculptor would — holes,
  broken surface, slivers, bumpy places, and where its halves differ —
  each with where it is, so an assistant knows where to work next.

• object.add_humanoid_rig(fingers=True) adds a thumb and four fingers a
  hand, three bones each, spread across the hand as measured. Off by
  default: on a Mixamo hand the template's fingers sit between the real
  ones and tear the middle finger's first joint, so it suits simple open
  hands, and check_rig says when it does not.

• Automatic weights can look before they warm: with visibility, a vertex
  takes heat only from bones it can see, not through skin — so a body's
  side stays off an arm hanging beside it. The humanoid rig turns it on when
  the arms hang down; held out, a figure tears less without it.

• Binding With Automatic Weights spreads each bone's weight by heat along
  the surface, as Blender does, rather than by distance through the air: a
  thigh no longer pulls on the other leg, nor an upper arm on the ribs. On a
  Mixamo body the edges a 45° bend tore went from hundreds to a handful.
  The old weights by distance stay, as weights="envelope".

• object.add_humanoid_rig fits a standard skeleton — hips to head, and
  shoulder, arm, hand, thigh, shin and foot a side, .L and .R — to the
  selected figure standing up Z, arms out or down, measuring its height, its
  legs, its reach and its feet, and binds it in the same step. Object ▸
  Parent ▸ Add Humanoid Rig.

• Symmetry for rigs: armature.symmetrize copies every left bone (.L,
  _l, Left…) to the right across X, parents and roll mirrored, and
  object.vertex_weights_mirror copies one half's weights to the other, a
  left bone's to the right one's — half a character rigged, the other half
  made from it.

• The connector's check_rig bends every bone of a rig in turn and
  measures the skin: which bones tear it and where, which pinch, which move
  nothing, and which vertices no bone holds — so an assistant can fix the
  worst and check again. A 67-bone character takes a tenth of a second.

• Vertex weights set exactly — object.vertex_weights_set, by vertex
  numbers, by a box, or the selection; replace, add or subtract; alone, so
  those vertices leave every other bone — and smoothed along the edges with
  object.vertex_weights_smooth. What an assistant rigging a model needs
  where a brush is guesswork.

• Assets ▸ Made by AI makes a model from words or a picture, on Hugging
  Face's free GPUs: words become a picture with Z-Image Turbo, the picture a
  model with TRELLIS, and the model lands in the scene and stays in the list
  to add again. A free Hugging Face token, kept in the settings folder,
  raises how much GPU time Hugging Face lends. The connector has it too:
  generate_model.

• Help ▸ Connect to AI Apps adds Kreate's tools to Claude Desktop, Claude
  Code, Cursor, VS Code, the Gemini CLI or Codex in one click — their other
  settings kept, a copy of the file as it was left beside it, a file that
  does not parse left alone — and shows which are already connected.

• The connector's capture takes views — front, back, left, right, top,
  bottom or the user's — and only, some objects alone, framed; and
  get_context says in a breath what is selected (and how many vertices,
  edges and faces in edit mode), where the cursor is and where the view
  looks from: what "this" and "here" mean to an assistant.

• The connector has a clock: timeline reads the frame, the range and
  every animated object with its takes, moves to a frame, plays or stops,
  and switches a take on or off with its timing kept — so an assistant can
  look at a pose at frame 30, or play the walk instead of the run.

• Under each answer in the chat panel, what it did — how many steps, how
  many objects added and removed — and a button that undoes all of it at
  once, as long as you have not changed the document since.

• Your own model files have pictures in the Assets editor: each is read and
  drawn once, from the front right and a little above, and the picture kept
  for next time.

• Objaverse in the Assets editor: Sketchfab's Creative Commons models —
  people, characters, creatures, props — found with Sketchfab's search and
  fetched from the Objaverse dataset on Hugging Face, with no account.
  Only licences that allow changing and selling are listed; a CC
  Attribution model says the credit it asks for. Poly Pizza, which needs a
  key, moves after it.

• Poly Pizza in the Assets editor: thousands of low-poly models, many of
  them animated characters, CC0 or CC-BY. Enter searches it; "Animated
  only" lists what moves. It wants a free API key of your own, pasted into
  the panel once and kept in Kreate's settings folder. A CC-BY model says
  the credit it asks for when it is added.

• Tiles show "▶ Animated" for a model that moves — Poly Pizza's, and your
  own glTF and FBX files — and "CC-BY" where a credit is owed.

• ambientCG in the Assets editor: its two thousand CC0 materials and its
  HDRIs, beside Poly Haven's.

• Compressed OpenEXR images open — as a world's light, a texture or an
  asset — and a folder's HDR and EXR files show their pictures in the
  Assets editor.

• Link a .kreate from the Assets editor rather than copy it: its objects
  are read-only here and read again from the file each time the document
  opens, so fixing a prop in its library fixes it in every scene.

• An Emission Map on a material: a picture the glow is multiplied by — a
  screen, a lit window. glTF's emissive texture imports and exports as one.

• FBX cameras (lens and film back) and lights (point, sun, spot) are
  imported; FBX gives lights no unit, so the brightness taken is noted.

• The AI chat can find and add assets: search_assets looks through
  Poly Haven, ambientCG or your folders, and add_asset brings one in.

• A saved document reopens seen from where it was looked at when saved:
  the view's angle, distance, lens and projection go in the file.

• Cut-out materials: a surface is cut away where its base colour image is
  clear, below the material's Alpha Clip — leaves, labels, grilles — in the
  studio view, the rendered view and the path-traced render. glTF's MASK
  imports as one and exports as one; BLEND (a clock's front, a lamp's
  shade) imports as glass.

• A cut-out casts the shadow of what is left of it — a leaf's, not its
  card's — in the rendered view and the path-traced render.

Changed

• Updates now come from the releases of github.com/MinaryHub/Kreate,
  where the source is too, instead of a separate releases-only repository.

• A new look, "Graphite Workshop": the chrome is three graphite steps, darker
  than the viewport, so the model is the brightest thing on screen; orange
  marks only what is selected or active. Numbers are set in IBM Plex Mono
  (bundled, SIL Open Font License) so columns of values line up; rows and
  fields are 24 px. The workspaces are one segmented group, the mode is named
  in its own quiet tint in the viewport header and the status bar, the status
  bar's shortcuts sit on key caps, and the outliner marks the active object
  with an accent edge.

• A new document is empty: no cube, no lamp, no camera. The world is still
  there, so what is added is lit in the rendered view.

• An import frames what arrived, so a part a few centimetres across is not a
  dot on the grid.

• Animated glTF characters from Sketchfab (and so Objaverse) move as they
  should. Their skins hang under nodes scaled to a hundredth or a fifth,
  which glTF does not count and Kreate did — the body walked off from its
  bones, or stood still beside them; joints scaled as they were bound grew
  their children; and a mesh hung from a joint (a robot's plate, a
  skeleton's bone, a sword in a hand) stayed behind. Each now matches what
  glTF says, frame by frame. A rig whose matrices are in centimetres under
  joints scaled to metres stands its bones at the body's size, not forty
  times it; a node scaled to nothing (a particle before it appears) no
  longer turns everything to NaN; and files using the older
  specular-glossiness, unlit or texture-transform extensions open.

• Tests keep to a temporary folder: a test that saved, failed or remembered
  a recent file no longer writes into your settings, caches or autosaves,
  where a hundred stale test sessions had piled up as recovery offers.

• New, Open and a dropped document ask Save, Don't Save or Cancel when the
  open one has unsaved changes; Save saves first (asking where, if it has
  never been saved) and a save dialog closed leaves you where you were.

• The first save of a document opens in the folder you last kept one in,
  or Documents, titled to say you are choosing the folder and the name.

• B during a move picks the snap base, as in Blender: the selection holds
  still, the pointer finds a vertex, edge or face of what is moving, a
  click takes it, and from then on that point lands on whatever the
  pointer snaps to — this corner onto that one. Rotate and scale keep B
  as the snapping toggle.

• A glTF character with several takes — idle, walk, run — keeps them all.
  The first plays; each other is a muted strip on the rig, to switch on.
  They were read as one, the last take over the rest.

• Hiding an object in the outliner hides its children with it. Each child
  keeps its own eye, drawn faint while its parent is hidden, and comes back
  when the parent does.

• An imported model or asset lands beside what is already there instead of
  inside it. Every asset is made at the origin, so a small one added after
  a large one was hidden inside it — in the outliner and nowhere to be seen.

• Pictures show in the Flat view and not the Studio one. Studio is lit to
  read shape and shows each material's colour; Flat shows its texture. A
  cut-out leaf is still cut in both.

• Importing a model — File ▸ Import, a dropped file, an asset — reads it in
  the background, so a large one no longer stops the window, and records
  the step as the file's path rather than the whole model: undo history
  and autosaves stay small.

Fixed

• Walk navigation went smoothly only while the keyboard repeated, and drifted
  back to where it started: the camera's smoothing pulled it to its old
  target every frame. It now walks every frame, at a pace set by how far off
  the view is looking.

• In the wireframe shading mode, dense meshes faded away as the view drew
  back — their wires are all there is of them, and now they stay.

• Cameras and lights from glTF files look and shine where the file says:
  each was tipped a quarter turn, a level camera looking at the floor and a
  sun shining sideways. Written out again, they stay the right way round.

• A .gltf whose buffers and textures are files beside it opens and
  imports; it needed everything embedded. References that leave the file's
  folder are refused.

• glTF import no longer reports that every texture went unread.

• Textures are the right way up. V runs up the picture, as in Blender and
  OBJ; every image was drawn upside down, which on a model whose texture
  holds all its parts — most from Poly Haven — put the wrong part on every
  face. In the studio view as well as the rendered one.