Release

PreonLab 4.1 Released

Local refinement was added as an experimental feature in PreonLab 4.0. Since then, we have received lots of feedback ranging from minor bug reports to very ambitious feature requests. Overall, we are very excited by the feedback and worked on numerous fixes and improvements for 4.1. Most notably, this includes full support for MPI and most sensors. We also removed the experimental flag so that the feature is now available for all users.

The two images below show an example in which local refinement is used to speed up a gearbox simulation. The image to the left shows the simulation with a uniform particle size of 1mm after 0.2 seconds. The image to the right shows the same setup with local refinement. Only in the region where the two gears come into contact, a particle size of 1mm is used. In other regions, a particle size of 2mm may be used. The resulting fluid behavior matches the uniform simulation well, while the required simulation time is reduced by more than a factor of 2 and disk space consumption is reduced by a factor of 5. Both simulations were performed on a 32-core workstation and the stated timings include rendering.

Per-sample sensor data is now available in preonpy. The new interface provides efficient and easy-to-use access for most sensor data produced by PreonLab. Libraries like numpy can utilize it to run fast operations on the data, like filtering or statistical analysis. Compared to the existing CSV export options, this can reduce computation times from hours to minutes when implementing custom post-processing capabilities.

The updated property editor now displays physical units for all appropriate properties, reducing the risk of mixing up units when entering values. We have addressed another common source of frustration by introducing colored states to indicate keyframed properties. It is now also much easier to see and if desired to reset properties that deviate from their default values. Finally, we invested a lot of effort to achieve a consistent look and feel of the entire UI including the property editor across all supported platforms.

PreonLab 4.1 improves the performance and stability of the snow solver. The updated implicit solver was optimized for more scenarios and made more robust. Check out our recent snow plow video below: