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For those who don’t know the tool: IlluGen is JangaFX’s standalone node-based authoring application for real-time VFX assets. It builds textures and geometry together: noises, masks, flowmaps, flipbooks, meshes and baked animation. Think of the ingredients for a game effect, with fewer trips between applications to fetch one missing ingredient.
The original IlluGen release brought 2D and 3D asset preparation into one graph. Version 2.0 gives that graph GPU particles, fracture tools and more ways to turn motion into something a game engine can consume. The current build is already 2.0.1, so the celebratory “2.0” comes with a small, useful decimal attached.
Particles become the brush
Start with Particle: System, use its glowing setup control and press Play. The GPU simulation operates in 2D or 3D, turning particles into texture-authoring inputs as well as animated objects. Scale, lifetime, colour, forces, interactions, masks and modulation shape the result, while events can drive changes to the particle system. Soft Relax separates overlaps, collisions bounce particles and Boids adds flocking. Those interactions can arrange non-overlapping elements for tileable textures. Trails and ribbons turn particle paths into editable geometry or textures; accumulation builds an image over time. The practical attraction is combining motion, shape and texture design without transferring half-finished assets between applications.
Particle: System orders Spawn, Forces, Interact and Modulation, integrating physics before Interact. Emission supports bursts, rates and point inputs. Force types include uniform, point, line, curl noise, UV texture, torus and local space; rotation and mesh attraction have separate modules. Point Colliders uses spheres, not mesh surfaces. Two-dimensional image collisions threshold greyscale textures. Lifetime/speed modulation, velocity alignment, event masks and atlas indexing control appearance. Sprite rendering supports sorting and accumulation; Render Motion converts velocity/spin into UVs.
Break something, then decide how it travels
Geometry nodes now show their results directly in the graph, so inspecting a chain no longer means guessing which intermediate shape you have built. Booleans combine shapes, Revolve spins a spline around an axis, and Fracture cuts a mesh around input points as solid pieces or surface shells. Each piece has its own pivot; particles can drive the pieces of any mesh with multiple pivots individually. Pivot animation textures, PAT, store rigid-piece movement and rotation rather than tracking every vertex as VAT does. For rigid pieces, JangaFX describes this as a lighter representation of the same motion, without giving a numerical memory reduction in the presentation. A flying brick need not have every vertex submit its own travel expenses.
Weighted Voronoi fracture provides IDs, pivots, interior/surface masks and recentering; solid cuts require closed meshes. Extrude controls thickness and retained front, back and wall geometry, with masks for the extruded parts. Geometry atlases stack individually addressable meshes or frame snapshots, adding variation when geometry is copied to points, much as image atlases provide different greyscale shapes. Extract Pivots, Animate Pivots and PAT Encode/Decode connect rigid pieces to particles. Attribute transfer, velocity extraction, relaxed scattering and bounds/volume sampling extend point workflows.
The flow has acquired some physics
UV Flow now uses multigrid pressure, MacCormack advection, multiscale vorticity and selectable wrapping/blocking boundaries; moving-collider velocities drive flow. Injector masks apply directional/radial/rotational forces with inherited motion and substeps. Advect offers Euler, RK2/RK4 and MacCormack. Angle-weighted normals, transformed tangents and Merge’s preserved shading can alter older results.
The rewritten UV Flow supports flowmap creation, less uniform sprite motion, fluid ripples and vortices. UV Injector uses a shape as a force brush, while extracted particle velocities can drive UV flow. Cache/Recall takes a downstream result back upstream for feedback, including progressive decay in flipbooks. UV chaos controls gain common noise settings for finer adjustment. Edge Rounding curves the corners of greyscale shapes and can be combined with Slope Blur for stylisation; UV Transform adds animatable position offsets. These connections are the useful part: motion can drive an image, an image can influence motion, and the graph keeps the relationship editable.
The reworked camera system offers a freely positioned camera and an orbit camera that behaves as a look-at setup; render nodes use those cameras too. Viewport gizmos show the cameras and their projection, including orthographic cameras. Selecting the viewport export node previews the actual output region. The 3D viewport can also be exported to a texture, either to add details to an existing render or to start another image-processing graph. The camera gets a visible job description, which is more than some production meetings manage.
Island processing gains distance and edge operations. Right-clicking a colour-gradient curve exposes export options, including CSV for carrying the gradient into a game engine and reproducing its colour progression there. Presets are organised into categories, with new examples for dissecting the added workflows. The release demonstration combines these tools in a finished effect, making the relationship between particle simulation, geometry, flow and exported assets easier to inspect than a list of isolated nodes.
Exports need a receiving end
IlluGen’s established asset outputs cover square and non-square textures, custom atlases, flipbooks, meshes, VAT, pivot-baked meshes, mesh flipbooks, flowmaps and UV distortions. A sword swipe, for example, needs its mesh, edge mask and animated noise to work together. Authoring those ingredients in one graph makes their interaction easier to judge before rebuilding the effect in the game.
The new Niagara exporter writes .hjson/.hbjson particle caches. Grid-spawned particles also act as probes for a vector field: inspect the forces and parameters in that grid, adjust them and export the sampled velocities as FGA. PAT and vector fields can be taken to other engines with appropriate import and playback setups. A point cache describes recorded particle behaviour; a vector field supplies directions and magnitudes; a baked animation texture needs a compatible playback material. Choose according to what the runtime effect actually needs rather than selecting whichever exporter sounds most reassuring.
SideFX’s Houdini Niagara plug-in provides the Unreal Engine cache route. It reads .hjson as text JSON and .hbjson as binary JSON, with the latter recommended for smaller files and faster imports. Both Niagara and Houdini Niagara must be enabled, and the plug-in build must match the engine. Its data interface exposes point attributes such as position, velocity, colour, orientation and lifetime; animated position playback requires IDs and time. Despite support for files over 2 GB, Niagara’s 32-bit indexing still limits the combined point/frame/attribute data. SideFX recommends splitting oversized caches. Export is the first half of a handoff. Playback is where the recipient gets a vote.
The useful decimal: 2.0.1
The current 2.0.1 build arrived on 16 October. Force types now compile smaller shaders separately; unused options stop producing redundant variants, and wiring Multi Blend or Multi Switch inputs no longer triggers compilation. Curl Noise uses analytic gradients and four times fewer noise samples per particle. That is a sampling change, not a promise of four-times-faster scenes. The build adds shader progress reporting, Mac/Linux update notices and a launch-failure fix.
Windows requires Windows 10 or 11, a quad-core Intel/AMD CPU at 2.5 GHz or faster, 8 GB RAM and a GTX 1060 or RX 580 baseline. Linux lists RHEL 9 or later with the same CPU, RAM and GPU baseline. The macOS ARM64 build needs Apple Silicon and 16 GB RAM; Sequoia and Tahoe are listed. Check these IlluGen-specific requirements rather than borrowing another JangaFX application’s platform list.
Licences, trials and that maintenance checkbox
Current Indie node-locked pricing is US$300 for a permanent licence with 12 months of updates, followed by optional US$180 annual maintenance. Rent-to-own costs US$20 monthly and becomes permanent after 18 consecutive payments. Studio node-locked costs US$1,600 initially and US$1,280 for annual maintenance, or US$160 monthly with permanence after 12 consecutive payments. Studio floating lists US$2,667 initially, US$2,133 maintenance and a three-licence minimum. All prices exclude taxes.
Indie is below US$1 million; Studio covers US$1 million–100 million, and Enterprise uses custom terms above that. Revenue, project budget or funding determines eligibility, whichever is greater. Maintenance auto-renewal is enabled by default on permanent purchases, with an opt-out at checkout. The 30-day trial starts at first export, requires no card and includes unlimited exports, all features and more than 50 preset projects.
For production adoption, compare existing graphs’ shading and validate the actual cache, PAT or texture playback in your target engine. The general documentation is still being completed, and the complete release record carries the finer node changes, UI improvements and fixes. More of the effect can now live in one graph. The final check still belongs in the game.
| Product | IlluGen 2.0; current downloadable build 2.0.1 |
| Developer | JangaFX |
| Release dates | 2.0 roadmap release: 14 October 2026; 2.0.1: 16 October 2026 |
| Platforms | Windows x86-64, Linux x86-64 and Apple Silicon macOS |
| Indie permanent | US$300 including 12 months of updates; optional maintenance US$180 annually |
| Indie rent-to-own | US$20/month; permanent after 18 consecutive payments |
| Studio node-locked permanent | US$1,600 including 12 months of updates; optional maintenance US$1,280 annually |
| Trial | 30 days from first export; full features and unlimited exports; no card required |
| Tax | Prices exclude taxes |
| Official page | JangaFX IlluGen |
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Article details
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- Bela Beier
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