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Changelog

v1.0.0 — Public release

The first public release of Octo Vector Bridge — the line-art bridge between Blender, Maya, and Toon Boom Harmony.

Highlights

  • 3D line art → native Harmony pencils — Blender (Grease Pencil or Pencil+) and Maya (Pencil+) strokes become editable Harmony vector pencil lines, camera-accurate and frame by frame.
  • Variable width preserved — real per-point pressure from Grease Pencil; for Pencil+, the flattened EPS width and colour are reconstructed by sampling the raster render. WYSIWYG: what the Previewer shows is what lands.
  • Bundled Potrace tracer — Image-Trace-style raster → vector in Black & White, Greyscale, and Colour (farthest-point median-cut). B&W traces filled shapes with Potrace and pencil centrelines with Zhang–Suen thinning.
  • Bitmap import — bring a raster in as a self-contained Toon Boom bitmap (default) or keep it linked to the original file.
  • Occlusion — raycast holdout culling removes strokes hidden behind geometry (the cull Blender's native SVG export can't do), with a WYSIWYG kept-vs-culled overlay.
  • WYSIWYG Previewer — field-space camera framing, cursor-anchored zoom, middle-mouse / Space pan, onion skin (vector and bitmap), snapping and field grid.
  • Outliner = node graph — the tree you build is the Harmony network written on Apply: pegs, groups, composites, and sibling aggregation by paint order. Delete Node (lift children) vs Delete Hierarchy.
  • Per-art-layer Inspector — thickness envelope + pressure detail, point cleanup, tip taper, and whole-drawing/peg transforms, each per subartlayer.
  • Weight-paint brushes + Thickness brush — Relax, Simplify, and Pressure paint a 0..1 heat-mapped mask; the non-weighted Thickness brush sculpts line weight directly. All non-destructive with a one-click Clear.
  • Merge split lines — optionally rejoin Harmony's planar-split pieces into single editable strokes, with a tri-state master toggle and per-art-layer overrides.
  • Subartlayers (multi-pass) — stack several passes on one art layer as separate vector objects; import-time organiser, collapsed cleanly into one Harmony art layer on Apply.
  • One import dialog — a single browse handles a folder, loose files, an image sequence, or a single frame, classifying art layers by folder/name and defaulting loose art to Line Art.
  • 14-day trial + perpetual licence — one machine-bound activation covers Blender, Maya, and Harmony, via Creem.

Architecture

  • One shared, DCC-neutral core (ovc_core) with thin per-host adapters for Blender, Maya, and Harmony.
  • Pure, shared width/point/taper functions run identically in the Previewer and the Harmony writer — the guarantee behind WYSIWYG.
  • Node graph emitted through a ported OSA-style emitter (peg / group / composite, MPI/MPO, sibling aggregation).
  • Bundled potrace binary — no external install.

Known issues

  • All recent fixes are validated headless (offscreen Qt); live-in-host validation across Blender / Maya / Harmony is ongoing.
  • Pencil+ variable-width reconstruction depends on a clean raster Line render element; a noisy render can soften the recovered width.
  • Windows installer is the primary target; macOS packaging and code-signing are still to come.

Pre-release history

Octo Vector Bridge was developed privately through late 2025 and 2026. Public history begins with v1.0.0.