Jacques Lucke writes:

I'm proud to present Animation Nodes 2.0. Previously my main focus was to achieve high flexibility. This allowed me build a very expressive general purpose node system. At this point, I can slowly start to focus on optimizing AN for common cases. This will result in an addon that is more user friendly. Features like falloff and vectorization (read the release notes to learn more about that) really aim at simplifying common tasks.

As a nice side effect this also allows for great performance optimizations from my side. Some nodes are up to 400 times faster now. Those high speedups are also possible due to the introduction of a new programming language called Cython. Unfortunately this also means that AN is not OS independent anymore. You will have to select the correct version for your operating system to make it work.

The manual improved at lot as well. This is all thanks to Omar Ahmad who spend many weeks to write an initial documentation for every single node. More help is always welcome though!

We worked hard on the release notes as well. They contain many examples, so wherever you want to begin, you can jump right in.

I have many more ideas that I will try to implement on in the upcoming months. Most notably I'm planning a new action socket which will be a huge deal for many motion graphics effects. Furthermore I finally want to have a good template system, a rewritten color system, an improved mesh data type and much more.

In a few weeks the current semester ends and the most productive time of the year starts. Then I have to decide whether to look for a summer job or to work on Animation Nodes as I did in recent years. To be able to afford the latter I need your support. Please checkout my Patreon page and consider to make a small monthly donation to help me to continue to amaze you.

Thanks to Thomas Beck who created the cover image for this post.