December was dedicated to some significant backend changes for HelioScope. You won't notice too many new features, but performance improvements and preparations for the future abound.

New Shading Engine

We rolled out a completely generalized shading model to our servers. This brings two major advantages

  1. Faster simulations: the 3D model is more robust and our algorithms can find answers faster than ever.
  2. More complex shapes: we haven't enabled this yet, but the new model supports more complicated obstructions.

3D is the New 2D

We officially launched 3D as our primary design environment - and since a top-down view in 3D is equivalent to a 2D view of your design, we removed 2D completely. You no longer need to toggle between 2D and 3D views, just rotate your view for 3D and click Recenter View for the top-down view.

Backend

We also made improvements to our billing system. Some of these are behind the scenes to give you more control over your billing in the future. The tangible changes you might notice are on the Billing tab of your account. We added the amount scheduled for renewal as well as the last 4 digits of the credit card to provide more transparency and let you know if you need to update anything.

We've got a lot more things we're working on so stay tuned for more updates!