Volumetric rendering

This release ships a new feature : utilities for volumetric rendering of E-field as a volume.

This helps you convert from the OpenEMS E-field dump file format (.vtr) to OpenVDB (.vdb) for rendering as a volume shader in blender.

.vtr files define an arbitrary grid (defined by your sim meshing) which would result in gaps in the resulting .vdb file if converted directly. The plugin interpolates the data to a fixed-spacing grid.

Because the E-field is defined everywhere, it would mostly render as a difficult to visualize fog. Sharp scaling of the values with a colorramp lets you see the E-field as a surface-like object but that would only depict an iso-E-field and not a proper wavefront. This is why the conversion script also creates a Sobel-filtered version of the E-field, which can still be rendered as a surface-like object for proper visualization but propagates in space. Then magnitude can be used as a color input to reflect magnitude of E-field.

Tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRHMpz3dKn8

Geometry Nodes !

This release comes with support for creating RF primitives geometry from within the geometry nodes editor.

You can now define parametric geometry using blender's Geometry Nodes system, then tag parts of the geometry with custom nodes provided by the plugin. Supported node include Metal conductors, materials, ports, and anchors, which means your meshing is parametric too, and moves with the design !

Add feature: latest version checking (optional)

This release adds a feature for checking the plugin's latest version from Github's release API.

It will tell you if you're up to date or not.
It will not install anything, nor is it periodic/automatic.

Homephoning is certainly not the point of this plugin, and I do not collect any data/telemetry on Plugin usage.
Use of this feature is not required ; feel free to manually check for updates if you do not feel like using Github's API.

If you have bugs or issues with the plugin, make sure you are running the latest version.

First release !

This is the first release of this project, v0.0.1-alpha

It will not be considered stable until v1.0.0.

This release contains the most basic features of the plugin, and map only a subset of OpenEMS' features.