Bake input missing in v5 beta

Plug Ins Elefront
1

I have been using the Elefront plugin for a very long time. Today I needed it again after updating to the v5 beta and am quite surprised by 2 changes that I immediately noticed:

  1. The Bake input in the bake component - Before there was a boolean input that you could use to trigger the Bake component. Great for when you actually want to bake the stuff and not hunt down the actual component in your GH script, but have all inputs and buttons in some sort of cockpit zone like a normal person.

  2. The material input - when creating bake attributes there used to be a color and a material input, whereas now there is only a color input. Why?

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I really hope there this is only some beta weirdness and will come back. For now it means using the Human plugin exclusively instead…

2

Hi Armin, the Bake input component was an issue as soon as they published V5, it’s been back since a previous update.

Capture d’écran 2022-08-16 à 09.01.06
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If I remember correctly, the dev team said they’re planning to add support to material and color througout Elefront V5, but aren’t there yet. That said, you can have both V5 and 4 installed in parallel and keep baking with materials and colors when needed.

Capture d’écran 2022-08-16 à 09.12.28
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I have to admit I always use Elefront V4 component, I’ve found that V5 has too many bugs or yet unsupported workflows…

1 Like
3

Thanks for the information! I did not notice that there was an update to the Elefront Beta, even though I was looking at it in the Package Manager - the UX of that thing is well… not great.

I now updated to 5.0.2 and at least the Bake boolean input is back. Why they omitted the material input I have no idea. They should take a page out of Human’s attribute component where you can not only set a material but also lets you apply the special cases “By Layer” (which is the default) and “By Parent” (which is super important when creating blocks). Let’s hope they are working on something clever.

V5 seems to be REALLY beta still, but does look promising nonetheless. I just hope a somewhat stable version is coming soon.

4

Hi Armin (and all),
We do indeed intend to put the material attribute back in. v5 is basically a ground-up rewrite, so for better or worse we can’t necessarily just carry features over, they are being reconsidered from scratch. So - it wasn’t a deliberate exclusion, just hasn’t been added back in yet. I know it’s annoying right now while things are in limbo, but hopefully everyone will benefit in the long run.

We’ve been pretty busy recently, but we are actively working on the next update! Materials are on their way, and we do intend to have By Layer, By Parent, etc. as we’ve done for the Color property:

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3 Likes
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Sounds great. Looking forward to the update!