NovaSkin Export 1.5.0

Quality improvements to how re-skinnable characters composite into the still (Mesh) wallpaper.

• Characters behind water / glass now match the render. What's in front of a character — a water tint, a reflection, an occluder — is exported as an exact per-channel composite (out = add + mul × character) instead of a single flat overlay. A submerged or behind-glass character keeps its true colour when re-skinned in the browser (blue water tints blue, dark skins no longer wash out) instead of looking like a milky decal.

• Exact scene look on the relit characters. The Mesh export now relights characters in linear light and applies the scene's real view transform (AgX / Filmic / …) as a baked 3D LUT, the same way the animated export does — so a re-skinned character matches the rendered scenery's look precisely, not an approximation.

These change the Mesh export format (static_version 2: an sRGB light atlas + a view_lut.png). The wallpaper tool renders the new format; older exports keep working unchanged.

Still-image and animated exports are otherwise unchanged. No workflow changes — just hit Render.

NovaSkin Export 1.4.3

More fixes for the Mixamo FBX → rig retarget and the export, in the Animation tab.

• Retarget keeps the rig's placement. If you positioned a character somewhere in the scene and then copied an animation onto it, the character used to jump back to the world origin. It now stays where you placed it, and the placement control still moves the whole animated rig afterwards.
• Export works from Pose / Edit mode. Clicking Export (Draft, full, or the still Mesh export) while a rig was in Pose or Edit mode — e.g. right after posing or placing it — could fail with "context is incorrect". The export now drops to Object mode on its own before it starts.

Internal: the exported manifest.json now stamps a routing format field (still mesh / animated) for the web tool.

NovaSkin Export 1.4.2

Mixamo retarget fixes for the Animation tab's Mixamo FBX → rig tool.

• Consistent size. The character no longer changes size depending on which FBX you copy from — the pose solve was leaving a spurious scale on the hips that cascaded to the whole rig. It's now stripped.
• Arms & shoulders. Arms copy as a clean pose-space rotation with the arm's World mode engaged, so the shoulders stay attached to the body on big poses instead of detaching.
• Hands. The source hand rotation is now applied, so the hands follow the forearm instead of staying locked to the body (which read as a twist at the wrist).
• Root motion. The animation's travel is placed on the rig's master Root bone, so the whole rig moves together instead of leaving the Root control behind at the origin.

No changes to the still or animated export output — this release only affects the retarget.

v1.4.1

Release 1.4.1

Atlas bake: zero bake margin -- the rig's per-pixel UV islands touch with no
gap, so any margin dilated each island's edge into pixels its neighbour owns
(e.g. the dark sleeve-bottom band over the arm-front's last row). Drop the
unused atlas blur path (a dead-end fix attempt). Viewer-side, the web tool
now clamps light-atlas samples to their own 1/64 skin-pixel cell instead.

UI: the Animation tab is stable since 1.4 -- always show it (drop the
"Enable animated export" add-on preference).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>

v1.4.0

NovaSkin Export 1.4.0

Animated export:
- Full quality bakes a per-frame UV light atlas per character -> the 2nd layer
  (hat/jacket/sleeves/pants) is lit correctly per-face; draft stays a fast screen-space
  light at half resolution / half fps.
- Optional layers export as toggleable depth-composited MESHES (a held sword, glass),
  each with a baked base texture (albedo + alpha -- captures material colour mods and
  transparency), re-skinnable in the browser.
- One composite.webm (bg/light/occ bands, single decoder) + view_lut.png.
- Fixed a mesh-vs-video one-frame desync on autoplay.

v1.3.0

First release with the interactive Mesh (v2) export — plus an experimental animated mode and a reworked legacy exporter (~100 commits since v1.2.3).

New: Mesh (v2) export — now the default

Export each character as a re-skinnable 3D mesh (mesh.bin + positions.bin) with a UV-space light atlas, instead of flat per-part images. Resolution-independent, both arm variants (classic + slim), per-entity foreground matte and shadows, and optional scenery layers exported as toggleable triangle ranges — so a web viewer can re-skin, relight, switch arms and toggle layers live.

New: Animated export (beta)

Animated wallpapers as video (background + foreground matte + light) plus a screen-space mesh stream, with a web player. Off by default — enable “Enable animated export (experimental)” in the add-on preferences.

Legacy Texture UV export: reworked, now opt-in

The legacy per-part UV export now reuses the mesh exporter’s scenery / shadow / sprite passes, writes per-entity subfolders (players/<label>/, layers/), and no longer lets transmissive water cut the player mask. It’s now off by default — enable “Enable legacy Texture UV export” in the add-on preferences (advanced / backward-compatible use).

Add-on preferences

Two toggles under Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → NovaSkin Export, both off by default, so the sidebar defaults to a clean Mesh-only workflow:

• Enable legacy Texture UV export
• Enable animated export (experimental)

Rendering fixes

Anti-aliased pixel-art sampling, premultiplied sprites (no dark edge fringe), per-sprite depth testing, combined shadow buffer, water tint, mask-crack fills, and bone-widget hiding during export.

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Install: download novaskin_export-1.3.0.zip below and install it as a Blender extension (Blender 4.2+).

v1.2.3

Release v1.2.3: drop the network permission

wm.url_open opens the system browser -- it is not the add-on accessing the network, so
the manifest permission is unnecessary (the web-link buttons keep working; they still
honor the Allow Online Access preference). Lean release for the extensions.blender.org
submission; cut from v1.2.2.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>

v1.2.2

Release v1.2.2: depth-range retry/abort fix

Bump 1.2.1 -> 1.2.2 (blender_manifest.toml + bl_info + ADDON_VERSION). Fixes a player
exporting with no depth (depth_range_viewer null) when the first depth render hit a
transient empty Viewer node -- now retried once and aborts loudly instead of silently
flattening the UV B channel and breaking depth occlusion. Verified end-to-end with a draft
render: player1 depth range restored, arm/head overlap now occludes correctly.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>

v1.2.1

Release v1.2.1: always-export 2nd layer + panel UX + extension compli…

v1.2.0

Release v1.2.0: occluded grouped layers, WebP, draft button

Bump 1.1.0 -> 1.2.0 (blender_manifest.toml + bl_info + ADDON_VERSION). Since v1.1.0:
optional layers occluded by the scenery (holdout) and groupable via armature/collection,
lossless WebP for UV and JPEG/WebP for light/shadow, "Render Draft (fast preview)" button,
single "Mark as Optional Layer" button, effective export resolution + stale-output cleanup
in the manifest.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>