2022 brought a truly remarkable number of new features and improvements to both Silo and its companion renderer, Milo. Silo saw the incorporation of Pixar’s OpenSubdiv to power its subdivision, built-in screen recording, a powerful implementation of non-destructive shape modifiers, and tons more. Milo added improved raytracing, VR improvements, playable reference characters, and saw other benefits from its upgrade to Unreal Engine 5. See more details below!
If you purchased or upgraded Silo & Milo from our site within the last year, you can download the latest update for free! If you already own a Silo & Milo license, you can upgrade your existing license to get the latest version plus a full additional year of updates. If you are new to Silo & Milo, you can buy a new license, which automatically includes a full year of free updates from your date of purchase.
UPGRADE YOUR LICENSE: nevercenter.com/upgrade
BUY A NEW LICENSE: nevercenter.com/silo
Silo 2022.0: MAJOR fundamental improvements to the deep inner workings of Silo
The 2022.0 release of Silo came with some major deep inner code rewrites. We swapped in Pixar’s OpenSubdiv library to power Silo’s subdivision surfaces, resulting in RAM usage reduction up to more than 50%, and interactive edits to your subd models working faster and smoother. We also completely redesigned Silo’s memory management, refreshed the interface with a new, more modern look, and fixed tons and tons of bugs. This release also came with several useful workflow updates, like improvements to manipulators and geometry selections across multiple viewports, and better behavior with the tool option windows and numerical fields.
Milo 2022.0: Playable Reference Characters
Milo 2022.0 introduced new playable reference characters, controlled via any standard gamepad. It's a fun, easy, and instantaneous way to interact with your art, whether you want to get a feel for the scale of game assets, more realistically show off your architectural work to clients, or just have fun running around in your creations.
Silo 2022.1: Built-In Time-Lapse Screen Recording
With Silo 2022.1, we added a new built-in way to record time-lapse videos of your modeling sessions! You can now record yourself modeling a masterpiece and upload it right to YouTube, Instagram, etc with no additional software needed. We also fixed several bugs and added some nice workflow improvements, like hiding manipulator handles that point directly in/out of the screen, and drawing infinite work grids in orthographic viewports.
Milo 2022.1: Fully-Usable VR Interface
For the Milo 2022.1 release, we gave Milo's VR capabilities a big shot in the arm by adding a fully-functional interface directly within VR. The interface mimics almost exactly the desktop version, giving you direct access to most features within the application. We also added a special VR-only file chooser, which lets you select from files within the current working directory.
Silo 2022.2: Align/Distribute Functions, SpaceMouse Navigation, and More
The Silo 2022.2 release added convenient new tools for aligning and evenly distributing selected items, plus support for viewport navigation using 3Dconnexion’s SpaceMouse hardware! Align/Distribute works with shape, face, edge, or vertex selections, with buttons to align or evenly distribute selections along a given axis. SpaceMouse navigation lets you intuitively navigate 3D spaces with 6 degrees of freedom, zooming, panning, and rotating simultaneously with one hand while your other hand can stay on your mouse or keyboard.
Milo 2022.2: Video Export
Two handy new features were added with the Milo 2022.2 release! First, we added video export, so you can now export your turntable renders to video formats (along with the previously-supported GIF export). Second, you can now disable shadows in the settings page, which is handy for scenarios (such as some interior renders) where shadows are getting in the way.
Silo 2022.3: Handy New Primitives!
The Silo 2022.3 release included several handy new primitives to help speed up your modeling workflow: Gear/Wheel, Quad Sphere, and Tri Sphere. The Gear/Wheel primitive comes with intuitive options that make it great for easily creating a huge variety of gears and wheels, but also for creating stars, towers, pipes, and more. All of these variations come with nice, ready-made UV maps. We also greatly expanded the options for creating different kinds of useful spheres in the Sphere options window: UV Sphere is the original Silo sphere type, Quad Sphere is based on a spherized divided cube (great for SubD box modeling), and Tri Sphere is based on a spherized divided icosahedron (perfect for smooth evenly-rendered spheres in a game engine).
Milo 2023.0: Major Under-the-Hood Upgrade to Unreal Engine 5, Plus New Lighting Rigs
Milo started 2023 with a bang, via a major upgrade to Unreal Engine 5. This involved significant reworking under the hood and will allow for many opportunities for future development. It also brought instant upgrades, including improved raytracing (on supported graphics cards), improved volumetric clouds, global illumination cast from the floor in the Color Room, and better rendering. We also added two powerful new lighting rigs designed for casting extremely soft shadows raytracing: Lightbox (omni-directional) and Ring Light (directional).
Silo 2023.0: Another Big Update With Non-Destructive Modifiers
For 2023.0, we added a major, much-requested feature in object modifiers! Modifiers are non-destructive, real-time modifications which automatically apply to a model on top of any changes you make, opening new, powerful workflows and usability improvements. At any point, you can bake applied modifiers into the shape and manually edit from there. You can also configure modifiers to be automatically baked on export for individual file formats. Bevels, extrusions, edge creasing, triangulation, deformations, and more were included in our initial set of modifiers, with many many more to come!
Each of the above updates is included FREE for any licenses/upgrades that were purchased within a year from that update's release. If you need to purchase an upgrade to your license (or see the latest version that is included with your license), go to nevercenter.com/upgrade
We love to hear from you—send us an email at silo@nevercenter.com, or reach out via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube. We want to hear your thoughts so we can keep updating with your requests, and we love to see what you are creating!
Best,
Nevercenter