Hello everyone,

I'm writing because I've made some fun progress with Anukari in the last couple of months. The pre-alpha test that started in September has been enormously helpful so far. The folks who are testing Anukari are saints for putting up with all sorts of crashes, performance issues, DAW compatibility problems, and so on. But their patience is paying off as I slowly work through these issues to get Anukari closer to an open public release.

While my main priorities are stability and performance, I did go off on a bit of a tangent in the last few weeks while working on MacOS optimizations, and rewrote the 3D graphics code. This was actually an important part of speeding up MacOS, but I went further and made a bunch of improvements to the 3D graphics. In particular I went ahead and made the graphics super-configurable, so you can balance the graphical fidelity with performance as needed. With a simple instrument, you can crank the graphics all the way up, or if you're pushing the limits with a mega-complicated instrument, you can drop down the graphics settings to save all the power for audio processing.

Some of the customizable graphics settings include:

• The "skybox" or 3D environment/background. Anukari will ship with a few presets, and you can also load arbitrary skyboxes you find on the internet or even create them yourself.
• The actual 3D models for the instrument components, like mallets, mics, etc. Again, Anukari will ship with some presets, but for advanced users it will be possible to completely replace them.
• Bloom effect, lens flare, bokeh effect.
• Sun color, position, intensity.

I'm really excited with the degree of visual customization that's now possible. You can really make the instrument your own, and give it the proper kind of visuals for the music you're making.

In addition to the graphics options, there are many new features in terms of how the instrument is animated. For example, the spherical bodies now get larger/smaller based on their mass, and their surface gets duller/shinier based on their damping. Springs get thicker with higher stiffness settings. All of the virtual link types (the colored lines connecting things) pulse with light based on the signal they are carrying, be it modulation, audio, etc.

This is a big milestone, as revamping the graphics was always something I planned to do before releasing Anukari. Once this work is wrapped up, I can go back to being laser-focused on stability, performance, and usability until the plugin is ready to go public.

Thank you all for your continued interest!

Here are some demo videos showing off what's possible with the new graphics settings:

And some screenshots:

Regards,
-Evan