What's New in Beta 2

Beta 2 Lyra expands Atlas with deformable meshes, new material controls, and Vulkan rendering for Windows and Linux. The existing scene, component, TypeScript, and project workflows carry over from Beta 1.

Deformable physics

• Cloth simulates triangle meshes with stretch, shear, bend constraints, anchors, collision thickness, and atmospheric wind.
• Soft bodies deform solid meshes using edge and volume constraints. Generate and cache tetrahedra in the Inspector to reuse the simulation mesh.
• Subdivision adds mesh detail with Simple or Loop subdivision before simulation.

These features use Bezel Jolt. Mesh density and solver iterations affect their cost, so begin with a small mesh and tune one setting at a time.

Materials and Photon

Materials expose dispersion, transmission attenuation, participating volumes, and subsurface scattering controls. Configure these alongside Photon for path-traced scenes.

Photon supports Metal and Vulkan paths. Path tracing requires ray-tracing support from the selected device; Atlas falls back to deferred rendering when that capability is unavailable. A Vulkan device alone does not guarantee path tracing.

Desktop editor and rendering

Beta 2 uses Metal on macOS and Vulkan on Windows and Linux. The editor embeds the corresponding runtime renderer in its viewport. Inspector enum values use dropdowns, and the Softbody component includes Generate Tetrahedra.

See Opal for backend selection and Atlas Editor for scene authoring.

Move a Beta 1 project to Beta 2

1. Keep a copy of the project before opening it with a newer editor.
2. Install a Beta 2 editor and matching runtime toolchain. Use the version identifier registered by that toolchain for atlas_version in project.atlas.
3. Regenerate scripting support with atlas script init, then compile scripts with atlas script compile. Check the Beta 2 API reference when updating scripts.
4. Review the renderer and backend in project settings. Run the project on each target platform before packaging it.
5. For deformable meshes, generate tetrahedra after finalizing geometry and scale, and include the cache in the packaged project assets.

Beta 1 documentation remains available for projects using the older runtime.