IlluGen: Whats new in 1.1.3?

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Hey, this is Nick from Jang FX. I'm going to be showing you what's new in Illusion 1.1.3.

[00:00:06]This is a pretty large update for quality of life, and we have a couple of new nodes. So, I figured I'd make you a video because I find quite a lot of these updates to be really important for the user experience of Illusion.

[00:00:18]If you want to see the change log, you can go to help and then release notes.

[00:00:22]And here you can see our actual change log.

[00:00:26]So, let's go ahead and hop into what's new. So, the first thing is we have a new bokeh blur node. And this helps you simulate, um, you know, some sort of, uh, blurring that would happen from, say, the lens of a camera and the aperture of the camera. And so, we kind of simulate this blur here, and you can see that we can change the radius and so on. You'll notice that I have a custom shape plugged into this, and this shape is, uh, basically the the form that this blur is taking on after we blur these little objects. And if I disconnect this node, you can see we have things like triangles, hexagons, uh, squares, and so on. And so, being able to just come in here and change, you know, say your lens gain, how much highlight boost, you know, if you want to swirl things around and so on. You have quite a lot of control over this, and so this is a neat new node.

[00:01:17]Next up is our looper node. And so, what this allows you to do is take an image sequence. And so, the image sequence is playing. We've got the looper, and then I'm encoding it into a sheet as we see here.

[00:01:30]And this is normally non-looping, and now we have a looping output. Now, this is not the greatest example of looping.

[00:01:36]There's still a few kinks we probably need to work out with the looper node itself. Um, but in general, you do have the ability to, um, come in, say which frames you want to capture. We can take, say, 90, uh, frames that we've exported from EmberGen and pack that down to 64.

[00:01:53]And so, then we have 26 frames of crossfade. You can do things like retiming. Uh, you can loop it with optical flow, so it will try and blend those flame, or those frames into the same shape, and so on. So, this is pretty interesting. I'd recommend you give it a try. And, uh, it's definitely better than doing it manually, even if sometimes the results aren't perfect.

[00:02:14]But, you could probably have a mask and cut that one little piece out if you needed to. So, next up is our new search terms. And so, in something like Substance Designer, they name a lot of nodes differently from what we named them. And so, I've tried to go in and add in a bunch of different node presets to help you find things that you're searching for. So, for instance, quantize is actually part of the pixelizer node. And it's where you can actually do quantization of an image.

[00:02:42]And then we have things like blend add and so on. So, if I come here and I say, "Hey, you know, I've got a noise and I want to, you know, invert it."

[00:02:50]Normally, you would come in and type, say, levels. And then we have, you know, auto level, and you can come here and invert this, and you have to flip this curve. But, now you can just say, you know, invert or inverse, and it's going to come in and invert the image for you.

[00:03:04]And it's already set up with a little preset. So, I think that's pretty cool.

[00:03:08]Some other things are, you know, say we can say, uh, multiply.

[00:03:13]So, multiply, right? So, blend multiply.

[00:03:16]We can multiply two different images together.

[00:03:19]And, uh, you can do, you know, say, add.

[00:03:21]Any kind of blend, we went ahead and made presets for all of it. Um, we also have stuff, uh, like, say, you know, Gabor noise or Perlin or whatever. So, you'll just have to go through, you know, look at some of the different presets. So, you can see that we have a bunch of different node presets now. Um, and hopefully, as you're typing different search terms, you'll be able to find some of the nodes, uh, that you might commonly be searching for, but you just don't know what to type. So, I've gone in and tried to do stuff. Oh, another big one is, uh, bevel.

[00:03:54]So, if you come in, you know, you can come in and bevel this particular thing.

[00:03:57]And this is actually a distance node.

[00:04:01]Um, but you might not know that. If you didn't know that distance could be used as a bevel node. So, there's a lot of cool new things that we've added. And, uh, you can find a list, uh, in the change log on our, um, roadmap.

[00:04:17]Next up is drop-down previews. So, this is a really, really big one for, um, user experience, I think. So, in general, used to, you would have to come here and click blend mode and then just hit your arrow keys to preview each thing or use your scroll wheel or whatever.

[00:04:34]Now, you can preview every single item like with in the actual use case that you have, uh, before you click anything.

[00:04:42]So, you can go, "Oh, you know what? I'm actually looking for this min darken here." And we already see the preview.

[00:04:47]You can disable these if you want though I don't see a reason why you would want to do that. It's not going to take up a lot of screen real estate, uh, real estate as it is, uh, dynamically scaling.

[00:04:58]So, we've got that. Really, really cool to have all these different previews. It works for all the different noise types.

[00:05:05]You know, just about any possible drop-down you can think of, uh, we do have these, uh, previews.

[00:05:13]The next place that we have previews is on the search menu. So, if I come here and I say noise, I can come and see, like, based on what this node is going to do, I can see a preview of the actual thing that's going to occur after I spawn this node. So, if I come here, I say blur, I can see all my different blurs. So, you know, you've got directional, bokeh, slope, etc. And I, you know, maybe I need my certain slope here or whatever it needs to be. And voila, I can kind of see this and, you know, mess around with it. It's pretty cool. We don't have the previews in these unnecessarily because you actually need an input for it to function or an output for it to function. But, you know, being able to come in and say, you know, shape or whatever, sharpen, uh, which that's another preset that I added. And also, if you want to find those presets, you can just type preset and you can just see all these different presets. So, ring, braided cable, square, triangle, star, etc. There's a bunch of stuff that we went ahead and and added, um, for certain search terms.

[00:06:14]So, that's pretty cool, and I'm glad that we've got these two previews.

[00:06:19]Now, one of the things that I'm, uh, most excited about in this particular release is this preview matrix. So, preview matrix is accessible through control shift M. And so, if I press this node and I hit control shift M, it's going to bring up this preview matrix.

[00:06:35]And as I click around, let me actually preview it. As I click around, um, it's going to show me, uh, different previews here.

[00:06:43]And so, I can take, say, the direction or let's say, uh, sample distribution and, you know, uh, my direction or something like that. And so, we've got, you know, forward, front, back, symmetrical, uniform, so on and so forth. But, I can come in and preview all of these different variations, um, really, really quickly. Um, and so that's just really, really cool. And I think that maybe my, uh, it was turning black because my timeline was playing with the looper node. And [snorts] so, but here we can see that, uh, it's updating really quickly now. And so, that's really, really cool. And so, but where it gets useful is where we say have, you know, maybe our noise type, and then we have maybe our noise octave combination. And now we can preview every single possible combination of all of these different things.

[00:07:33]And so, it's a really, really helpful way to just go in and kind of see all the different variations that you have for noise based on the actual live settings that you have, uh, in the node.

[00:07:43]So, if we come here and we kind of change the intensity, that's going to update. If we change the scale, it's going to update. So, this is kind of a cool floating window, um, to be able to do this kind of stuff.

[00:07:54]And it's just really useful, you know, also for previewing stuff like blend modes. So, if I come here, we can kind of see our blend mode, and we can see, you know, our mixing level. And so, this kind of shows us um, what's going on.

[00:08:07]And so, if I come back and I change the scale to something more sensible and maybe choose this.

[00:08:13]And now we can come to this. And now we can see all these different blending modes, um, with different levels of mixing. So, it's definitely really cool to be able to come in and kind of diff, um, a bunch of different parameters. And you can set things like your ranges that you want to preview and so on. So, this is super, super powerful, and it's extremely useful for just finding out different variations and, um, think trying to figure out what a node can do for you. And you just kind of come here and choose, uh, your different parameters that you want to preview and that you want to diff. So, definitely cool.

[00:08:48]Next up is a pixelizer reduction. Uh, previously, the pixelizer was, I guess, more of like a screen space effect. Um, and so, you know, by default, we have something like this once you plug in a little shape to the pixelizer. But, now you can have a reduction level, and it is regardless of what your primary resolution is. So, this is resolution independent, uh, reduction. And so, it's definitely really cool. I think it's going to make the pixelizer node a lot more useful. And of course, you can come in here and, you know, choose a bunch of different, um, you know, dithering modes and quantization modes and so on. So, a lot of cool stuff with the pixelizer.

[00:09:26]Um, to help with splines, particularly in 3D, um, if we come here, you can kind of see that this is not like aligned with the ground. And so, though we don't have, uh, like custom transform gizmos and stuff like that to help you out just yet, um, two things that we did add is we added, uh, you know, kind of snapping. So, we have small step snapping, and we have large snapping.

[00:09:50]And then the next thing is is we have this geometry data. And so, if I want to zero this out on Z, I can just come here and just click inside this table for our geometry, and now this is actually locked down to this particular floor. And now, of course, if I move it around again, like it's going to mess up because splines are screen space inside of Illusion, but we can come here and edit things and kind of say, you know, "Hey, I want this at 15. I want this at 25." and so on, and kind of place your splines that way. Hopefully, this helps you just a little bit make things a bit easier. We will be redoing splines in the future so that they are far, far easier to mess with, but for now, this is kind of the best intermediary solution that we have.

[00:10:37]The next thing is that images can now be pasted, so I'm going to copy and paste an image, and so I can just paste it here, and voila, here is our texture that we've got, and you can see this is a screenshot of a new preset from Illusion.

[00:10:52]I just would say be mindful of where this saves on your hard drive. We probably have like an output destination for this. I'm not sure though, but it is by default the presets folder, and so just be mindful of where this is saving, but you can copy and paste images and textures and so on into Illusion, and it's going to save that path for you, so that's pretty cool.

[00:11:16]Then finally, the last thing is send and receive. So, send and receive has been a highly requested feature. So, if I come here and I say send, and then we name this, let's just say glow or something like that. So, we name our receiving pin, and so now we come here and we say receive, and we say glow.

[00:11:39]Voila. Now, we have kind of cut it. We can see this little preview of what it's connecting to. If we zoom all the way out, and you'll also notice that we do have some new node views as well for when you zoom out to make things a bit easier to spot.

[00:11:54]But either way, this is how you can do send and receive, and you can have quite a lot of send and receive pins.

[00:11:59]Hopefully, this will help you clean up your graphs and so on, so definitely really cool. A lot of cool new features, particularly on the usability side, and I hope you like the new update. Leave us a comment below what you think, and we'll catch you later.