Vexus 2.0 | Scene Assembler & Render Pass Manager for 3ds Max

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel 3ds Max 2015, Artikel Rendering, Artikel Thinkbox Software,

[ #Rendering #Vexus #3dsMax ] Boomer Labs and Joker Martini has released Vexus v2.0, which is a standalone node based editor for constructing, managing, and manipulating 3D computer generated scenes, making it easy to set up render passes.
The unique design of Vexus allows users to work with massive scenes for any kind of project, both small and large. Vexus removes repeating scene setup work with it’s dynamic tokening system and flexible framework. Artists can save, reuse, and share setups. Vexus allows to work with massive scenes and removes repetitive setup work with its dynamic tokening system and flexible framework, allowing for studio specific customization.
Vexus includes 3ds MAX support for version 2015 through 2017.

Notable new features include support for Thinkbox Software’s Deadline, presets and Universal Render Engine support.

Some new features in v2.0
• SHARE & RE-USE
Teams can easily share and re-used graphs to avoid repeating work and improving production efficiency. Vexus files are saved as simple XML text documents

• CUSTOMIZABLE
Users can define the default values, properties, and colors of every node in the graph. Users can also create new custom nodes to address specific studio needs.

• DYNAMIC TOKENS
Users can create custom tokens, which can be used to dynamically control values of graph nodes, such as output paths.

• RENDER ENGINES
Vexus natively supports industry standard render engines including; Vray and Corona. Now with Version 2.0, support for Render Presets allows all preassigned render settings and render engines to be conveniently recalled from within Vexus. As always, Vexus is user extendible allowing for further render customization.

• INCREDIBLE SPEED
Wait no more, adjust the look and feel of your scenes instantly. Whether there are 100 objects or 10,000 objects, Vexus can handle it with ease. With an an integrated scene submission tools, entire groupings of shots and passes and easily be rendered in a click of a button.

• SCRIPTING EXTENDIBILITY
Artists can extend the capabilities of Vexus using Python and Maxscript scripting languages. We also offer a service of extending Vexus functionality for Studio specific needs.

You can read the full product documentation HERE.

>> See Also: Ornatrix V5 for 3ds Max

A quick review for Vexus

Availibility

The price for the package is $200 USD per seat with support for Max 2015-2017, and v2.0 is a free upgrade for existing users. Visit Boomer Labs’ website to download and for more info.
  More 3ds Max Plugin [post_ad]

[ #Rendering #Vexus #3dsMax ] Boomer Labs and Joker Martini has released Vexus v2.0, which is a standalone node based editor for constructing, managing, and manipulating 3D computer generated scenes, making it easy to set up render passes.
The unique design of Vexus allows users to work with massive scenes for any kind of project, both small and large. Vexus removes repeating scene setup work with it’s dynamic tokening system and flexible framework. Artists can save, reuse, and share setups. Vexus allows to work with massive scenes and removes repetitive setup work with its dynamic tokening system and flexible framework, allowing for studio specific customization.
Vexus includes 3ds MAX support for version 2015 through 2017.

Notable new features include support for Thinkbox Software’s Deadline, presets and Universal Render Engine support.

Some new features in v2.0
• SHARE & RE-USE
Teams can easily share and re-used graphs to avoid repeating work and improving production efficiency. Vexus files are saved as simple XML text documents

• CUSTOMIZABLE
Users can define the default values, properties, and colors of every node in the graph. Users can also create new custom nodes to address specific studio needs.

• DYNAMIC TOKENS
Users can create custom tokens, which can be used to dynamically control values of graph nodes, such as output paths.

• RENDER ENGINES
Vexus natively supports industry standard render engines including; Vray and Corona. Now with Version 2.0, support for Render Presets allows all preassigned render settings and render engines to be conveniently recalled from within Vexus. As always, Vexus is user extendible allowing for further render customization.

• INCREDIBLE SPEED
Wait no more, adjust the look and feel of your scenes instantly. Whether there are 100 objects or 10,000 objects, Vexus can handle it with ease. With an an integrated scene submission tools, entire groupings of shots and passes and easily be rendered in a click of a button.

• SCRIPTING EXTENDIBILITY
Artists can extend the capabilities of Vexus using Python and Maxscript scripting languages. We also offer a service of extending Vexus functionality for Studio specific needs.

You can read the full product documentation HERE.

>> See Also: Ornatrix V5 for 3ds Max

A quick review for Vexus

Availibility

The price for the package is $200 USD per seat with support for Max 2015-2017, and v2.0 is a free upgrade for existing users. Visit Boomer Labs’ website to download and for more info.
  More 3ds Max Plugin [post_ad]

Read more »

Thinkbox Frost MX 2.0 for 3ds Max 2012 - 2017

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel Frost MX, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ #3dsMax ]
Thinkbox Software has announced the availability of Frost MX 2.0, a major update to the fast and flexible plug-in for Autodesk 3ds Max. A go-to tool for meshing particles and fluid simulations for many artists, Frost MX 2.0 nearly doubles the performance of previous releases, integrates more deeply with Chaos Group’s V-Ray and introduces new workflow improvements for greater ease of use. Thinkbox has also launched the beta for Frost MY 2.0, the Autodesk Maya version of the plug-in.

>> See Also: Thinkbox Frost Basic tutorials

With up to twice the speed in particle meshing modes, Frost MX 2.0 allows artists to increase productivity and complete jobs more quickly. Its integration with V-Ray v3.1 and higher enables customizable particle scattering for distributing and rendering millions of mesh instances in Custom Geometry meshing mode. The new V-Ray Instancing mode leverages dynamic memory allocation to render millions of high-resolution meshes with very low memory overhead. Frost MX 2.0 continues to support all Custom Geometry features in V-Ray Instancing mode, including particle channel propagation, material and shape ID controls, animation timing offsets and motion blur from particle velocity. Coupled with the advanced particle generation and Magma data channel manipulation capabilities offered by Thinkbox’s Krakatoa MX, which is available at no extra cost via the License-Free mode, the V-Ray Instancing feature offers a whole new world of power and flexibility to Frost users.

“The latest version of Frost is a massive leap forward in terms of speed. By stripping away much of the computational burden traditionally associated with data-heavy particle meshes and fluid simulations, we’re enabling artists to work more dynamically and see their work come to life more quickly,” said Chris Bond, founder, Thinkbox Software.

Additionally, the new region of interest option in Frost MX 2.0 lets users easily define a custom bounding box region that can be applied to Viewport meshing for faster previews while adjusting settings of complex particle data sets, to remove unwanted areas in Render-time meshing, or both. A dedicated Frost menu bar has been added to 3ds Max’s main menu for faster access to major features such as creating Frost objects, auto-adding new sources to a Frost object, accessing the Log window, and mass-changing the meshing mode of selected Frost objects.

Frost MX 2.0 is available for 64-bit versions of 3ds Max from 2012 to 2017, and requires an updated license. Additional information is available here. For beta access to Frost MY 2.0, email Thinkbox Software

  More 3ds Max Plugin [post_ad]

[ #3dsMax ]
Thinkbox Software has announced the availability of Frost MX 2.0, a major update to the fast and flexible plug-in for Autodesk 3ds Max. A go-to tool for meshing particles and fluid simulations for many artists, Frost MX 2.0 nearly doubles the performance of previous releases, integrates more deeply with Chaos Group’s V-Ray and introduces new workflow improvements for greater ease of use. Thinkbox has also launched the beta for Frost MY 2.0, the Autodesk Maya version of the plug-in.

>> See Also: Thinkbox Frost Basic tutorials

With up to twice the speed in particle meshing modes, Frost MX 2.0 allows artists to increase productivity and complete jobs more quickly. Its integration with V-Ray v3.1 and higher enables customizable particle scattering for distributing and rendering millions of mesh instances in Custom Geometry meshing mode. The new V-Ray Instancing mode leverages dynamic memory allocation to render millions of high-resolution meshes with very low memory overhead. Frost MX 2.0 continues to support all Custom Geometry features in V-Ray Instancing mode, including particle channel propagation, material and shape ID controls, animation timing offsets and motion blur from particle velocity. Coupled with the advanced particle generation and Magma data channel manipulation capabilities offered by Thinkbox’s Krakatoa MX, which is available at no extra cost via the License-Free mode, the V-Ray Instancing feature offers a whole new world of power and flexibility to Frost users.

“The latest version of Frost is a massive leap forward in terms of speed. By stripping away much of the computational burden traditionally associated with data-heavy particle meshes and fluid simulations, we’re enabling artists to work more dynamically and see their work come to life more quickly,” said Chris Bond, founder, Thinkbox Software.

Additionally, the new region of interest option in Frost MX 2.0 lets users easily define a custom bounding box region that can be applied to Viewport meshing for faster previews while adjusting settings of complex particle data sets, to remove unwanted areas in Render-time meshing, or both. A dedicated Frost menu bar has been added to 3ds Max’s main menu for faster access to major features such as creating Frost objects, auto-adding new sources to a Frost object, accessing the Log window, and mass-changing the meshing mode of selected Frost objects.

Frost MX 2.0 is available for 64-bit versions of 3ds Max from 2012 to 2017, and requires an updated license. Additional information is available here. For beta access to Frost MY 2.0, email Thinkbox Software

  More 3ds Max Plugin [post_ad]

Read more »

Thinkbox Software Stoke MX 2.3 Beta videos

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel particle, Artikel Stoke MX, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ #3dsMax ]ThinkboxSoftware has shared some new video for its particle reflow and editing tool for 3ds Max - STOKE MX 2.3 Beta. This update has Birth Magma and Per-Step Magma evaluation to the Stoke Particle Simulator object. The update allows to create custom channels, affect simulation channels over the course of the simulation, control particle life and death, and adjust the advection field’s influence over the particles based on custom logic.

>> See Also: STOKE MX video Tutorials

Per-Step Magma AdvectionOffset Scaling
In this demonstration, we will use the new Per-Step-Magma in the Stoke Particle Simulator to test particles against a mesh volume, and modify their speed and color accordingly.


Birth And Per-Step-Magma Particle Deletion
In this demonstration, we will use the Birth and Per-Step Magma features in the Stoke Particle Simulator to delete particles procedurally or explicitly in a history-dependent manner.



Related post: Naiad Particle Simulation Enhanced by Stoke MX



  More Stoke MX Plugin [post_ad]

[ #3dsMax ]ThinkboxSoftware has shared some new video for its particle reflow and editing tool for 3ds Max - STOKE MX 2.3 Beta. This update has Birth Magma and Per-Step Magma evaluation to the Stoke Particle Simulator object. The update allows to create custom channels, affect simulation channels over the course of the simulation, control particle life and death, and adjust the advection field’s influence over the particles based on custom logic.

>> See Also: STOKE MX video Tutorials

Per-Step Magma AdvectionOffset Scaling
In this demonstration, we will use the new Per-Step-Magma in the Stoke Particle Simulator to test particles against a mesh volume, and modify their speed and color accordingly.


Birth And Per-Step-Magma Particle Deletion
In this demonstration, we will use the Birth and Per-Step Magma features in the Stoke Particle Simulator to delete particles procedurally or explicitly in a history-dependent manner.



Related post: Naiad Particle Simulation Enhanced by Stoke MX



  More Stoke MX Plugin [post_ad]

Read more »

Krakatoa 2.6 for 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel Krakatoa, Artikel Krakatoa MX, Artikel Krakatoa MY, Artikel Maya, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ #Krakatoa ]Thinkbox Software Inc has announced Krakatoa 2.6 for 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya The updated renderer now supports Depth Of Field with user-defined Bokeh effects and Anamorphic squeeze support. Depth Of Field calculations on multi-core machines have also been made faster.

>> See Also: Watch Krakatoa on CGRecordTV

The Adaptive Motion Blur option also significantly improves animation rendering performance by processing only as many passes as the number of screen-space pixels traveled by the fastest moving particle in the data set.

Krakatoa MY 2.6.0

added support for the newly released Autodesk Maya 2017.
Features
  -Added support for Maya 2017
  -Removed support for Maya 2013
  -Added adaptive motion blur
  -Added anamorphic squeeze, bokeh shape maps, and bokeh blend map options for rendering DOF
  -Added a birth channel generator utility for generating "sticky" channels
  -Added an "IgnoreBackfaces" input to the NearestPoint and IntersectRay Magma operators
  -Added support for OpenGLCoreProfile and DirectX11 viewport 2.0 modes
  -Added optimizations to the number of render threads
  -Added optimizations to the partitioning of particles for multiple threads when rendering with DOF
  -Added a version number in the Krakatoa UI\
  -Added the generation of color channels from vertex colors to the PRTVolume and PRTSurface

Fixes
  -Fixed playback and timeline scrubbing when using parallel and serial dependency graph evaluation modes in Windows and OS X
  -Fixed an issue where Maya particles couldn't be rendered in Maya 2016 on Linux
  -Fixed the exporting of PRT files via Deadline
  -Fixed incorrect alpha channels when saving to EXR

See full list here
Krakatoa 2.6 for Autodesk Maya supported Maya Versions: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017

Krakatoa MX 2.6.1 for 3ds Max

introduces World Space Modifier versions of the previously existing Krakatoa Delete and PRT Cloner modifiers, and enables the multi-level cloning using both OSM and WSM PRT Cloners without Source channel collisions. The Magma system adds a large number of Random operators, and the Noise operators now expose a new Phase input which can be controlled per-particle.
  -Adaptive Motion Blur
  - Depth Of Field Bokeh Effect
  -New World Space Modifiers
  -Magma Random Operators
Improvements To Existing Features
  -Depth Of Field Performance
  -Combining PRT Cloner Modifiers
  -Magma Modifier Source Channel Toggle
  -PRT Cloner Modifier Color Channel Multiplication Option
  -Magma Modifier 'Use Existing Channels' Toggle
  -Magma Noise Operators Phase Option
  -Magma Use Existing Channels Option
  -PRT Loader Partition Channels
  -Magma Editor HDPI Support
  -Krakatoa Menus And MacroScripts
  -Particle Data Viewer Access
See full list here
Krakatoa 2.6 for 3ds Max supported 3ds Max Versions: 3ds Max 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017.

Availability

Mopre detail here
  More Krakatoa Plugin [post_ad]

[ #Krakatoa ]Thinkbox Software Inc has announced Krakatoa 2.6 for 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya The updated renderer now supports Depth Of Field with user-defined Bokeh effects and Anamorphic squeeze support. Depth Of Field calculations on multi-core machines have also been made faster.

>> See Also: Watch Krakatoa on CGRecordTV

The Adaptive Motion Blur option also significantly improves animation rendering performance by processing only as many passes as the number of screen-space pixels traveled by the fastest moving particle in the data set.

Krakatoa MY 2.6.0

added support for the newly released Autodesk Maya 2017.
Features
  -Added support for Maya 2017
  -Removed support for Maya 2013
  -Added adaptive motion blur
  -Added anamorphic squeeze, bokeh shape maps, and bokeh blend map options for rendering DOF
  -Added a birth channel generator utility for generating "sticky" channels
  -Added an "IgnoreBackfaces" input to the NearestPoint and IntersectRay Magma operators
  -Added support for OpenGLCoreProfile and DirectX11 viewport 2.0 modes
  -Added optimizations to the number of render threads
  -Added optimizations to the partitioning of particles for multiple threads when rendering with DOF
  -Added a version number in the Krakatoa UI\
  -Added the generation of color channels from vertex colors to the PRTVolume and PRTSurface

Fixes
  -Fixed playback and timeline scrubbing when using parallel and serial dependency graph evaluation modes in Windows and OS X
  -Fixed an issue where Maya particles couldn't be rendered in Maya 2016 on Linux
  -Fixed the exporting of PRT files via Deadline
  -Fixed incorrect alpha channels when saving to EXR

See full list here
Krakatoa 2.6 for Autodesk Maya supported Maya Versions: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017

Krakatoa MX 2.6.1 for 3ds Max

introduces World Space Modifier versions of the previously existing Krakatoa Delete and PRT Cloner modifiers, and enables the multi-level cloning using both OSM and WSM PRT Cloners without Source channel collisions. The Magma system adds a large number of Random operators, and the Noise operators now expose a new Phase input which can be controlled per-particle.
  -Adaptive Motion Blur
  - Depth Of Field Bokeh Effect
  -New World Space Modifiers
  -Magma Random Operators
Improvements To Existing Features
  -Depth Of Field Performance
  -Combining PRT Cloner Modifiers
  -Magma Modifier Source Channel Toggle
  -PRT Cloner Modifier Color Channel Multiplication Option
  -Magma Modifier 'Use Existing Channels' Toggle
  -Magma Noise Operators Phase Option
  -Magma Use Existing Channels Option
  -PRT Loader Partition Channels
  -Magma Editor HDPI Support
  -Krakatoa Menus And MacroScripts
  -Particle Data Viewer Access
See full list here
Krakatoa 2.6 for 3ds Max supported 3ds Max Versions: 3ds Max 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017.

Availability

Mopre detail here
  More Krakatoa Plugin [post_ad]

Read more »

Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 for 3ds Max 2012 - 2017

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel Krakatoa, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ @thinkboxsoft ]Thinkbox Software has announced that Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 for 3ds Max 2012 - 2017 is now available. In addition to adding support for Autodesk 3ds Max 2017 and fixing a few bugs, it improves the integration with Sitni Sati's FumeFX fluid simulator and adds a few new features which should make several particle editing and rendering workflows much faster and easier.

Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 now uses a different approach to accessing FumeFX data and should support future builds of FumeFX without the need for a recompile. On top of that, the PRT FumeFX object has been updated with advanced timing controls similar to the ones found in the PRT Loader, allowing the direct live retiming of FumeFX simulation data without saving PRT files to disk.

>> See Also: Watch Krakatoa video | Krakatoa tutorial

Along the same lines, the PRT Source object has been enhanced significantly to accept any particle source supported by Krakatoa itself, giving the user the ability to duplicate any particle system on the fly and apply transformations, deformations, Magma modifiers, culling operations etc. to the live clone without saving to PRT files first.

Talking about Magma, a new member of the growing Magma family is the SpaceMagma World Space Modifier. It enables the channel editing, scene data sampling and data display after the particles have been transformed to world space and possibly deformed by Space Warps and other WSMs. This once again removes the need to first bake a PRT object to a PRT file sequence and operate on a PRT Loader to gain access to the world space data of the particles, and should make particle editing workflows a lot more streamlined and significantly faster. The existing IntersectRay and NearestPoint operators now offer the option to ignore backfaces for all particles or on a per-particle basis for added flexibility.

PFlow Live Editing Using PRT Source And Space Magma

This video demonstrates some new workflows in Krakatoa MX 2.5 for deforming and editing live particles systems without pre-baking to a PRT file sequence.

PRT Source from Mesh And Legacy Particles

In this video, we look at the ability of the PRT Source object to duplicate both mesh vertices and legacy particles as Krakatoa particles that can be combined using the PRT Cloner modifier.

A new Birth Channel Generator utility has been added to Krakatoa MX to facilitate the generation of "Birth Channels" as a post processing step. A Birth Channel will contain the particle's value at the time of birth of the particle, or at a user-specified reference time, and will propagate forward and backward in time, allowing for various effects like sticky camera projections and more.

Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 Birth Channel Generator Utility

In this video we take a quick look at some possible workflows with the new Birth Channel Generator utility in Krakatoa MX 2.5.

The venerable Krakatoa PRT Birth and PRT Update operators in Particle Flow which used to accept only PRT Loaders as the data source have also been expanded like the PRT Source to accept any supported particle source (except for other Particle Flow systems due to a design limitation of Particle Flow itself). This means that you can now read data from any Krakatoa PRT object, Stoke Particles, Cebas Thinking Particles, 3ds Max legacy particles, Mesh vertices, or Spline interpolation points to create a update particles in a Particle Flow system.

Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 PFlow Operators With Splines, Meshes, and PRT Obects

In this video we take a quick look at some possible workflows with the new Birth Channel Generator utility in Krakatoa MX 2.5.

On the rendering front, the PCache now allows the pre-caching of Emission and Absorption channels and the toggling of the Use Emission and Use Absorption options on and off without the need to reload particles, and also introduces support for a per-particle ReflectionStrength channel to modulate raytraced or environment map reflections per particle.

For a full list of the new features, improvements, and bug fixes, please see the Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 Release Notes.

Availability

Krakatoa MX 2.5 requires an updated license. Please contact Thinkbox Sales to request your update if you are on active Support and Maintenance contract, or to purchase an upgrade or request an Evaluation license if you are not on active Support.

  More 3ds Max Plugin [post_ad]

[ @thinkboxsoft ]Thinkbox Software has announced that Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 for 3ds Max 2012 - 2017 is now available. In addition to adding support for Autodesk 3ds Max 2017 and fixing a few bugs, it improves the integration with Sitni Sati's FumeFX fluid simulator and adds a few new features which should make several particle editing and rendering workflows much faster and easier.

Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 now uses a different approach to accessing FumeFX data and should support future builds of FumeFX without the need for a recompile. On top of that, the PRT FumeFX object has been updated with advanced timing controls similar to the ones found in the PRT Loader, allowing the direct live retiming of FumeFX simulation data without saving PRT files to disk.

>> See Also: Watch Krakatoa video | Krakatoa tutorial

Along the same lines, the PRT Source object has been enhanced significantly to accept any particle source supported by Krakatoa itself, giving the user the ability to duplicate any particle system on the fly and apply transformations, deformations, Magma modifiers, culling operations etc. to the live clone without saving to PRT files first.

Talking about Magma, a new member of the growing Magma family is the SpaceMagma World Space Modifier. It enables the channel editing, scene data sampling and data display after the particles have been transformed to world space and possibly deformed by Space Warps and other WSMs. This once again removes the need to first bake a PRT object to a PRT file sequence and operate on a PRT Loader to gain access to the world space data of the particles, and should make particle editing workflows a lot more streamlined and significantly faster. The existing IntersectRay and NearestPoint operators now offer the option to ignore backfaces for all particles or on a per-particle basis for added flexibility.

PFlow Live Editing Using PRT Source And Space Magma

This video demonstrates some new workflows in Krakatoa MX 2.5 for deforming and editing live particles systems without pre-baking to a PRT file sequence.

PRT Source from Mesh And Legacy Particles

In this video, we look at the ability of the PRT Source object to duplicate both mesh vertices and legacy particles as Krakatoa particles that can be combined using the PRT Cloner modifier.

A new Birth Channel Generator utility has been added to Krakatoa MX to facilitate the generation of "Birth Channels" as a post processing step. A Birth Channel will contain the particle's value at the time of birth of the particle, or at a user-specified reference time, and will propagate forward and backward in time, allowing for various effects like sticky camera projections and more.

Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 Birth Channel Generator Utility

In this video we take a quick look at some possible workflows with the new Birth Channel Generator utility in Krakatoa MX 2.5.

The venerable Krakatoa PRT Birth and PRT Update operators in Particle Flow which used to accept only PRT Loaders as the data source have also been expanded like the PRT Source to accept any supported particle source (except for other Particle Flow systems due to a design limitation of Particle Flow itself). This means that you can now read data from any Krakatoa PRT object, Stoke Particles, Cebas Thinking Particles, 3ds Max legacy particles, Mesh vertices, or Spline interpolation points to create a update particles in a Particle Flow system.

Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 PFlow Operators With Splines, Meshes, and PRT Obects

In this video we take a quick look at some possible workflows with the new Birth Channel Generator utility in Krakatoa MX 2.5.

On the rendering front, the PCache now allows the pre-caching of Emission and Absorption channels and the toggling of the Use Emission and Use Absorption options on and off without the need to reload particles, and also introduces support for a per-particle ReflectionStrength channel to modulate raytraced or environment map reflections per particle.

For a full list of the new features, improvements, and bug fixes, please see the Krakatoa MX 2.5.0 Release Notes.

Availability

Krakatoa MX 2.5 requires an updated license. Please contact Thinkbox Sales to request your update if you are on active Support and Maintenance contract, or to purchase an upgrade or request an Evaluation license if you are not on active Support.

  More 3ds Max Plugin [post_ad]

Read more »

Thinkbox Stoke MX v2.1.0.59 for 3ds Max 2013 - 2016

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel particle, Artikel Stoke MX, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX, [ #3dsMax ]Thinkbox Software has announced the new update of Stoke MX. This 3ds Max Plugin is an easy to use Particle Simulator designed to simplify the creation of high volume particle clouds driven by Velocity Fields

>> See Also: STOKE MX video Tutorials

Changes for v2.1.0.59 are:

- Adds support for FumeFX 4.0
- Adds Field Loader support for reading OpenVDB (.vdb) version 3 files
- Adds Field Loader support for reading Field3D (.f3d) files with gzip compression
- Adds support for using PhoenixFD as an InputField source in Field Magma
- Fixes several issues related to using PhoenixFD as a Velocity Field Source
- Fixes 'unknown system exception' that occurred when using PhoenixFD as a Distribution Source
- Fixes incorrect particle positions when using FumeFX with a boundless grid
- Fixes Grid Bounds position in the Field Loader when 'Apply Object Transforms' is enabled

Stoke MX R&D by Rigel Bowen

Download

You can buy Stoke for MX $595 or download demo version here.

  More 3ds Max Plugin [post_ad]

[ #3dsMax ]Thinkbox Software has announced the new update of Stoke MX. This 3ds Max Plugin is an easy to use Particle Simulator designed to simplify the creation of high volume particle clouds driven by Velocity Fields

>> See Also: STOKE MX video Tutorials

Changes for v2.1.0.59 are:

- Adds support for FumeFX 4.0
- Adds Field Loader support for reading OpenVDB (.vdb) version 3 files
- Adds Field Loader support for reading Field3D (.f3d) files with gzip compression
- Adds support for using PhoenixFD as an InputField source in Field Magma
- Fixes several issues related to using PhoenixFD as a Velocity Field Source
- Fixes 'unknown system exception' that occurred when using PhoenixFD as a Distribution Source
- Fixes incorrect particle positions when using FumeFX with a boundless grid
- Fixes Grid Bounds position in the Field Loader when 'Apply Object Transforms' is enabled

Stoke MX R&D by Rigel Bowen

Download

You can buy Stoke for MX $595 or download demo version here.

  More 3ds Max Plugin [post_ad]

Read more »

Krakatoa C4D v2.4.1.59 for Cinema 4D R17

Artikel Cinema 4D, Artikel Krakatoa, Artikel Krakatoa C4D, Artikel Krakatoa for Cinema 4D, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ #Krakatoa #VFX ]Thinkbox Software has announced the new version of Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D with support for R17 has been released. It also includes several enhancements to existing features, support for more point file formats, and some bug fixes.

>> Krakatoa for Cinema 4D: Introduction videos

Features are:

  -Added support for CINEMA 4D R17.
  -Added extra sanity checks and error checking for partitioning.
  -Improved support for C4D's default lights.
  -Fixed a bug when using X-Particles that was clearing particle densities.
  -Added a major memory optimization that solves potential crashing problems for renders that are very high resolution (4K, 8K+). This problem only affected computers that have a very large number of cores.
  -Added new features to the "Sticky Channel" generation. Users now have the ability to choose an arbitrary point in time to use as the sticky channel source. The channels then propagate backward and forward in time.
  -Fixed coordinate system bug with RealFlow "bin" particle file format loading.
  -Added new support for RealFlow "bin" unit length scaling.
  -Added support for loading more LiDAR file formats to the PRT Loader, including .E57, .PTG, and Sequoia .SPRT.

Availability

More information about Krakatoa C4D v2.4.1.59 for Cinema 4D R17 here!
  More Cinema 4D Plugin [post_ad]

[ #Krakatoa #VFX ]Thinkbox Software has announced the new version of Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D with support for R17 has been released. It also includes several enhancements to existing features, support for more point file formats, and some bug fixes.

>> Krakatoa for Cinema 4D: Introduction videos

Features are:

  -Added support for CINEMA 4D R17.
  -Added extra sanity checks and error checking for partitioning.
  -Improved support for C4D's default lights.
  -Fixed a bug when using X-Particles that was clearing particle densities.
  -Added a major memory optimization that solves potential crashing problems for renders that are very high resolution (4K, 8K+). This problem only affected computers that have a very large number of cores.
  -Added new features to the "Sticky Channel" generation. Users now have the ability to choose an arbitrary point in time to use as the sticky channel source. The channels then propagate backward and forward in time.
  -Fixed coordinate system bug with RealFlow "bin" particle file format loading.
  -Added new support for RealFlow "bin" unit length scaling.
  -Added support for loading more LiDAR file formats to the PRT Loader, including .E57, .PTG, and Sequoia .SPRT.

Availability

More information about Krakatoa C4D v2.4.1.59 for Cinema 4D R17 here!
  More Cinema 4D Plugin [post_ad]

Read more »

Thinkbox Software XMesh NK Loader for NUKE

Artikel NUKE, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel XMesh NK Loader,

[ @thinkboxsoft #Nuke ]Thinkbox Software has released the XMesh NK Loader. XMesh is a production-proven geometry caching plug-in designed to streamline animation and visual effects pipelines. The XMesh NK Loader allows users of The Foundry NUKE v7 and higher to load XMesh data saved from Autodesk Maya or Autodesk 3ds Max into NUKE for rendering.

>> See Also: NUKE tutorial

XMesh saves animated scene geometry in a compressed format, yielding smaller files for faster loading, manipulation, and sharing across departments and facilities. Channel data that is not changing between frames is deduplicated efficiently, further reducing file sizes. The cross-platform and cross-tool compatible plug-in is easy-to-use and makes for a powerful addition to digital workflows.

The XMesh Loader plug-ins for NUKE, Maya and 3ds Max are available at no cost.
The XMesh Saver plug-ins require a license which can be used in both 3ds Max and Maya.

To request access to the XMesh NK Loader, and evaluate the XMesh Saver for 3ds Max and/or Maya, please contact sales@thinkboxsoftware.com.

  More NUKE Plugin [post_ad]

[ @thinkboxsoft #Nuke ]Thinkbox Software has released the XMesh NK Loader. XMesh is a production-proven geometry caching plug-in designed to streamline animation and visual effects pipelines. The XMesh NK Loader allows users of The Foundry NUKE v7 and higher to load XMesh data saved from Autodesk Maya or Autodesk 3ds Max into NUKE for rendering.

>> See Also: NUKE tutorial

XMesh saves animated scene geometry in a compressed format, yielding smaller files for faster loading, manipulation, and sharing across departments and facilities. Channel data that is not changing between frames is deduplicated efficiently, further reducing file sizes. The cross-platform and cross-tool compatible plug-in is easy-to-use and makes for a powerful addition to digital workflows.

The XMesh Loader plug-ins for NUKE, Maya and 3ds Max are available at no cost.
The XMesh Saver plug-ins require a license which can be used in both 3ds Max and Maya.

To request access to the XMesh NK Loader, and evaluate the XMesh Saver for 3ds Max and/or Maya, please contact sales@thinkboxsoftware.com.

  More NUKE Plugin [post_ad]

Read more »

Stoke MX 2.0.17 for 3ds Max

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel Stoke, Artikel Stoke MX, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ #3dsMax ]Thinkbox Software has announced that Stoke MX 2.0.17 Update Now Available

>> See Also: Stoke for 3dsMax tutorial by Xiang Pu Zhu

New Features

-Enabled support for Thinking Particles 6.x beyond 6.0.

Bug Fixes

-Fixed the licensing of Stoke components unrelated to Simulation. Using Stoke Field Loader, Stoke Texmap, Stoke Field Magma etc. on render nodes will now only check for a valid floating workstation license on the License Server, but will not check it out. This allows unlimited network rendering using Stoke components as long as a floating workstation license has been purchased. Performing Particle or Field Simulations on the network will still require a floating Stoke Simulation license.
-Renamed "MaterialID" to "MtlIndex" in Magma channel sampling operators.

More information and download here
  More 3ds Max Plugin

[ #3dsMax ]Thinkbox Software has announced that Stoke MX 2.0.17 Update Now Available

>> See Also: Stoke for 3dsMax tutorial by Xiang Pu Zhu

New Features

-Enabled support for Thinking Particles 6.x beyond 6.0.

Bug Fixes

-Fixed the licensing of Stoke components unrelated to Simulation. Using Stoke Field Loader, Stoke Texmap, Stoke Field Magma etc. on render nodes will now only check for a valid floating workstation license on the License Server, but will not check it out. This allows unlimited network rendering using Stoke components as long as a floating workstation license has been purchased. Performing Particle or Field Simulations on the network will still require a floating Stoke Simulation license.
-Renamed "MaterialID" to "MtlIndex" in Magma channel sampling operators.

More information and download here
  More 3ds Max Plugin

Read more »

Thinkbox Software Krakatoa C4D 2.3.2

Artikel Cinema 4D, Artikel Krakatoa, Artikel Krakatoa for Cinema 4D, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ #Cinema4D #C4D #VFX #Particle ]Thinkbox Software has announced that new updated version of Krakatoa C4D is now available

>> See Also: Krakatoa for Cinema 4D tutorial

New Features are:

  -Support for Cinema 4D R16.
  -A new Gradient Channel Operator tag, removed gradient settings from within PRT Loaders.
  -Support for RealFlow .RPC, LiDAR point cloud .LAS, .PTS, .PTX and .XYZ files to the PRT Loader.
  -Support for the camera's "Film offset" parameters.
  -Support for the Cinema 4D default light.
  -Various bug fixes including checking for disabled nodes; Turbulence FD stability issues; PRT Volume viewport display, performance and motion blur problems; TP Motion Blur, and more.
  More Krakatoa for Cinema 4D Plugin

[ #Cinema4D #C4D #VFX #Particle ]Thinkbox Software has announced that new updated version of Krakatoa C4D is now available

>> See Also: Krakatoa for Cinema 4D tutorial

New Features are:

  -Support for Cinema 4D R16.
  -A new Gradient Channel Operator tag, removed gradient settings from within PRT Loaders.
  -Support for RealFlow .RPC, LiDAR point cloud .LAS, .PTS, .PTX and .XYZ files to the PRT Loader.
  -Support for the camera's "Film offset" parameters.
  -Support for the Cinema 4D default light.
  -Various bug fixes including checking for disabled nodes; Turbulence FD stability issues; PRT Volume viewport display, performance and motion blur problems; TP Motion Blur, and more.
  More Krakatoa for Cinema 4D Plugin

Read more »

Krakatoa C4D 2.3.2 for CINEMA 4D R16

Artikel Cinema 4D, Artikel Krakatoa for Cinema 4D, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ #Cinema4D #C4D #Krakatoa ]Thinkbox Software has announced that new updated version of Krakatoa C4D is now available with support CINEMA 4D R16

>> See Also: Krakatoa C4D tutorial

Features are:

  -Support for Cinema 4D R16.
  -A new Gradient Channel Operator tag, removed gradient settings from within PRT Loaders.
  -Support for RealFlow .RPC, LiDAR point cloud .LAS, .PTS, .PTX and .XYZ files to the PRT Loader.
  -Support for the camera's "Film offset" parameters.
  -Support for the Cinema 4D default light.
  -Various bug fixes including checking for disabled nodes; Turbulence FD stability issues; PRT Volume viewport display, performance and motion blur problems; TP Motion Blur, and more.

For a detailed list of new features and bug fixes, please see the Krakatoa C4D Release History page. The update does not require a new license and is available from the same download link as v2.3.1
  More Krakatoa for Cinema 4D Plugin

[ #Cinema4D #C4D #Krakatoa ]Thinkbox Software has announced that new updated version of Krakatoa C4D is now available with support CINEMA 4D R16

>> See Also: Krakatoa C4D tutorial

Features are:

  -Support for Cinema 4D R16.
  -A new Gradient Channel Operator tag, removed gradient settings from within PRT Loaders.
  -Support for RealFlow .RPC, LiDAR point cloud .LAS, .PTS, .PTX and .XYZ files to the PRT Loader.
  -Support for the camera's "Film offset" parameters.
  -Support for the Cinema 4D default light.
  -Various bug fixes including checking for disabled nodes; Turbulence FD stability issues; PRT Volume viewport display, performance and motion blur problems; TP Motion Blur, and more.

For a detailed list of new features and bug fixes, please see the Krakatoa C4D Release History page. The update does not require a new license and is available from the same download link as v2.3.1
  More Krakatoa for Cinema 4D Plugin

Read more »

Thinkbox Frost MX v1.4.0.55671 for 3ds Max 2010 - 2015

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel Frost MX, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

[ #3dsMax #VFX #MotionGraphics ]Thinkbox Software has announced that FROST - a compound geometry object for 3ds Max that can be used to generate a single mesh from particles, vertex clouds, object positions, point data files or a combination thereof using various iso-surface and geometry cloning techniques version 1.4.0.55671 is now available with support the 32 and 64 bit builds of 3dsMax 2010 - 2015

>> See Also: Thinkbox Frost Basic tutorials

Changes for v1.4.0.55671 are:

- Adds support for Max 2015
- Removed support for Max 2009 and earlier
- Adds support for reading RealFlow RPC particle files
- Adds support for reading LAS particle files
- Adds support for reading PRT 1.1 CoordSys metadata
- Changed some error messages to include the name of the affected Frost node
- Fixes a crash when adding PRT Loader as a particle source in Max 2011
- Fixes an error in Geometry meshing with Custom Geometry for particles with Radius = 0
- Fixes an error reading CSV, XYZ, PTS, and PTX files when using German locale
- Fixes getting Velocity from a Krakatoa PRT Loader with its Playback Graph enabled
- Adds a horizontal scrollbar to the log window
- Fixes invalid undo messages

See the Frost in action

Sucker Punch Intro Logo Breakdown from Mark Theriault

Download

You can Download Thinkbox Frost MX v1.4.0.55671 for 2010 - 2015 demo version here or buy it for $495
  More 3ds Max Plugin

[ #3dsMax #VFX #MotionGraphics ]Thinkbox Software has announced that FROST - a compound geometry object for 3ds Max that can be used to generate a single mesh from particles, vertex clouds, object positions, point data files or a combination thereof using various iso-surface and geometry cloning techniques version 1.4.0.55671 is now available with support the 32 and 64 bit builds of 3dsMax 2010 - 2015

>> See Also: Thinkbox Frost Basic tutorials

Changes for v1.4.0.55671 are:

- Adds support for Max 2015
- Removed support for Max 2009 and earlier
- Adds support for reading RealFlow RPC particle files
- Adds support for reading LAS particle files
- Adds support for reading PRT 1.1 CoordSys metadata
- Changed some error messages to include the name of the affected Frost node
- Fixes a crash when adding PRT Loader as a particle source in Max 2011
- Fixes an error in Geometry meshing with Custom Geometry for particles with Radius = 0
- Fixes an error reading CSV, XYZ, PTS, and PTX files when using German locale
- Fixes getting Velocity from a Krakatoa PRT Loader with its Playback Graph enabled
- Adds a horizontal scrollbar to the log window
- Fixes invalid undo messages

See the Frost in action

Sucker Punch Intro Logo Breakdown from Mark Theriault

Download

You can Download Thinkbox Frost MX v1.4.0.55671 for 2010 - 2015 demo version here or buy it for $495
  More 3ds Max Plugin

Read more »

XMesh MX 1.3.0.55681 for 3ds Max 2010 - 2015

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel 3ds Max 2015, Artikel Motion Graphic, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX, Artikel XMesh MX,

[ #3dsmax ]Thinkbox Software has announced that XMesh MX 1.3.0.55681 is now available for Max 2010 to 2015

>> See Also: XMesh MX Video Tutorials

Changes for 1.3.0.55681 are:

- Adds support for Max 2015
- Removed support for Max 2009
- Adds 'Enable' checkbox for Viewport and Render to the Loader
- Fixes and error saving Particle Flow particles with scale 0
- Changed to write CREATE_*.MS scripts even if 'Create XMesh Loaders' is off
- Fixes 'Configure License...' crash when no license had been configured before

XMesh was used by Blur Studios in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” Opening Sequence

Download

You can download XMesh MX 1.3.0.55681 for 3ds Max 2010 - 2015 demo version here.
  More 3ds Max Plugin

[ #3dsmax ]Thinkbox Software has announced that XMesh MX 1.3.0.55681 is now available for Max 2010 to 2015

>> See Also: XMesh MX Video Tutorials

Changes for 1.3.0.55681 are:

- Adds support for Max 2015
- Removed support for Max 2009
- Adds 'Enable' checkbox for Viewport and Render to the Loader
- Fixes and error saving Particle Flow particles with scale 0
- Changed to write CREATE_*.MS scripts even if 'Create XMesh Loaders' is off
- Fixes 'Configure License...' crash when no license had been configured before

XMesh was used by Blur Studios in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” Opening Sequence

Download

You can download XMesh MX 1.3.0.55681 for 3ds Max 2010 - 2015 demo version here.
  More 3ds Max Plugin

Read more »

Thinkbox Krakatoa for Cinema 4D is now Available

Artikel Cinema 4D, Artikel Featured, Artikel Krakatoa, Artikel Krakatoa for Cinema 4D, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,
[ #Krakatoa #Cinema4D ]Friedrichsdorf, April 14, 2014 – MAXON, the leading developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation and rendering solutions, today announces the immediate availability of Thinkbox Software’s powerful particle renderer, Krakatoa. CINEMA 4D R14 and R15 users now have access to numerous new functions for editing and rendering large, high-quality particle swarms.

>> See Also: Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D

The plugin includes important features such as:

  -Point or voxel representation of particle data with various filter modes, motion blur and depth of field camera effects, and HDRI render passes output to OpenEXR files.
  -Concurrent support for additive and volumetric shading models, with per-particle control over data including color, emission, absorption, density and more.
  -Integration with the native particle systems of CINEMA 4D as well as with third party products like X-Particles by Insydium Ltd. and TurbulenceFD by Jawset Visual Computing.
  -A powerful render-time particle repopulation option to produce high-density particle clouds from low count base simulations.
  -Dedicated tools for creating "sticky" Camera Projection mapping for advanced dissolving effects.

Krakatoa for C4D was created as a result of the enormous amount of attention generated by a C++ API prototype of Krakatoa SR that was developed by Ugly Kid artist Daniel Hennies and his small team of developers that they showed at MAXON’s SIGGRAPH 2013 booth.

Daniel: “I was quite overwhelmed by Thinkbox’s positive response to what we created. The tremendous enthusiasm and dedication from Thinkbox was spectacular; the new plug-in will enhance the whole experience for CINEMA 4D users and enable particle enthusiasts to take final quality to a new level.”

Thinkbox Software founder Chris Bond says: “CINEMA 4D has a storied history in motion graphics and is a rising star in the creation of feature film VFX; we’re excited to introduce ourselves to CINEMA 4D users and can’t wait to see how Krakatoa is leveraged by talent.”

“We recognize success for digital artists today depends on integrated solutions with the industry’s best tools,” said Harald Egel, MAXON co-founder and CEO. “Krakatoa is widely recognized as a leader in robust volumetric particle manipulation and rendering. The availability of Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D brings profound artistic freedom to VFX creatives.”

Krakatoa for MAXON CINEMA 4D is available immediately for Windows and OSX for CINEMA 4D R14 and higher. For more information visit here

  More Cinema 4D Plugin

[ #Krakatoa #Cinema4D ]Friedrichsdorf, April 14, 2014 – MAXON, the leading developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation and rendering solutions, today announces the immediate availability of Thinkbox Software’s powerful particle renderer, Krakatoa. CINEMA 4D R14 and R15 users now have access to numerous new functions for editing and rendering large, high-quality particle swarms.

>> See Also: Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D

The plugin includes important features such as:

  -Point or voxel representation of particle data with various filter modes, motion blur and depth of field camera effects, and HDRI render passes output to OpenEXR files.
  -Concurrent support for additive and volumetric shading models, with per-particle control over data including color, emission, absorption, density and more.
  -Integration with the native particle systems of CINEMA 4D as well as with third party products like X-Particles by Insydium Ltd. and TurbulenceFD by Jawset Visual Computing.
  -A powerful render-time particle repopulation option to produce high-density particle clouds from low count base simulations.
  -Dedicated tools for creating "sticky" Camera Projection mapping for advanced dissolving effects.

Krakatoa for C4D was created as a result of the enormous amount of attention generated by a C++ API prototype of Krakatoa SR that was developed by Ugly Kid artist Daniel Hennies and his small team of developers that they showed at MAXON’s SIGGRAPH 2013 booth.

Daniel: “I was quite overwhelmed by Thinkbox’s positive response to what we created. The tremendous enthusiasm and dedication from Thinkbox was spectacular; the new plug-in will enhance the whole experience for CINEMA 4D users and enable particle enthusiasts to take final quality to a new level.”

Thinkbox Software founder Chris Bond says: “CINEMA 4D has a storied history in motion graphics and is a rising star in the creation of feature film VFX; we’re excited to introduce ourselves to CINEMA 4D users and can’t wait to see how Krakatoa is leveraged by talent.”

“We recognize success for digital artists today depends on integrated solutions with the industry’s best tools,” said Harald Egel, MAXON co-founder and CEO. “Krakatoa is widely recognized as a leader in robust volumetric particle manipulation and rendering. The availability of Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D brings profound artistic freedom to VFX creatives.”

Krakatoa for MAXON CINEMA 4D is available immediately for Windows and OSX for CINEMA 4D R14 and higher. For more information visit here

  More Cinema 4D Plugin

Read more »

Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D

Artikel Cinema 4D, Artikel Featured, Artikel Krakatoa, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,
Los Angeles, CA (December 16, 2013) – Thinkbox Software today announced that it has acquired code to bring its powerful particle renderer, Krakatoa, into MAXON’s CINEMA 4D modeling and animation software. Initial efforts to link the plug-in with CINEMA 4D were led by Ugly Kids artist Daniel Hennies, who collaborated with a developer to program a bridge to the stand-alone version of Krakatoa (SR). Leveraging the C++ API of Krakatoa SR, Hennies and a small team were able to fully integrate the particle renderer with CINEMA 4D and first demoed the technology at SIGGRAPH 2013.

>> See Also: Krakatoa tutorial

"I was really motivated to incorporate Krakatoa into my workflow since the majority of my projects involve creating fluids, particles and high quality renders, which are time and memory intensive in CINEMA 4D," explained Hennies. "I didn’t want to switch creative applications so I took matters into my own hands. Krakatoa renders blazingly fast in CINEMA 4D and handles particles in a way that wasn’t possible before. The plug-in was fun to develop and I’m eager to see it grow with the expertise and support of Thinkbox."

"It is great news that Thinkbox and Daniel Hennies are enabling Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D users; we've had multiple requests for Krakatoa. This bridge is a huge win to our users and I am looking forward to great artwork rendered with Krakatoa C4D," noted Oliver Meiseberg, Product Manager CINEMA 4D, MAXON Computer.

Image courtesy of Daniel Hennies, Ugly Kids

"We’re super excited about bringing Krakatoa to CINEMA 4D and are thankful that Daniel has done the heavy lifting on integration," said Chris Bond, founder, Thinkbox Software. "We’re always on the look out for ways our solutions can better serve artists; extending support to additional software packages is just one of the many enhancements up our sleeve."

Following the acquisition, Thinkbox is refining the tool’s feature set and plans to launch the official Krakatoa C4D Beta in early 2014. Krakatoa is currently available off-the-shelf for Autodesk® Maya® and Autodesk® 3ds Max®.

About Thinkbox Software

Founded by Chris Bond in 2010, Thinkbox Software develops production-proven tools for visual artists and backs each product with highly responsive support. Used across entertainment, engineering and design, Thinkbox’s products include Deadline high-volume data management software used to render or process files and several other artist-driven software tools to create, visualize and modify datasets for visual effects, animation and digital simulations. For more information, visit www.thinkboxsoftware.com or follow @thinkboxsoft on Twitter.

  More Cinema4D Plugin

Los Angeles, CA (December 16, 2013) – Thinkbox Software today announced that it has acquired code to bring its powerful particle renderer, Krakatoa, into MAXON’s CINEMA 4D modeling and animation software. Initial efforts to link the plug-in with CINEMA 4D were led by Ugly Kids artist Daniel Hennies, who collaborated with a developer to program a bridge to the stand-alone version of Krakatoa (SR). Leveraging the C++ API of Krakatoa SR, Hennies and a small team were able to fully integrate the particle renderer with CINEMA 4D and first demoed the technology at SIGGRAPH 2013.

>> See Also: Krakatoa tutorial

"I was really motivated to incorporate Krakatoa into my workflow since the majority of my projects involve creating fluids, particles and high quality renders, which are time and memory intensive in CINEMA 4D," explained Hennies. "I didn’t want to switch creative applications so I took matters into my own hands. Krakatoa renders blazingly fast in CINEMA 4D and handles particles in a way that wasn’t possible before. The plug-in was fun to develop and I’m eager to see it grow with the expertise and support of Thinkbox."

"It is great news that Thinkbox and Daniel Hennies are enabling Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D users; we've had multiple requests for Krakatoa. This bridge is a huge win to our users and I am looking forward to great artwork rendered with Krakatoa C4D," noted Oliver Meiseberg, Product Manager CINEMA 4D, MAXON Computer.

Image courtesy of Daniel Hennies, Ugly Kids

"We’re super excited about bringing Krakatoa to CINEMA 4D and are thankful that Daniel has done the heavy lifting on integration," said Chris Bond, founder, Thinkbox Software. "We’re always on the look out for ways our solutions can better serve artists; extending support to additional software packages is just one of the many enhancements up our sleeve."

Following the acquisition, Thinkbox is refining the tool’s feature set and plans to launch the official Krakatoa C4D Beta in early 2014. Krakatoa is currently available off-the-shelf for Autodesk® Maya® and Autodesk® 3ds Max®.

About Thinkbox Software

Founded by Chris Bond in 2010, Thinkbox Software develops production-proven tools for visual artists and backs each product with highly responsive support. Used across entertainment, engineering and design, Thinkbox’s products include Deadline high-volume data management software used to render or process files and several other artist-driven software tools to create, visualize and modify datasets for visual effects, animation and digital simulations. For more information, visit www.thinkboxsoftware.com or follow @thinkboxsoft on Twitter.

  More Cinema4D Plugin

Read more »

Thinkbox Software XMesh MY for Autodesk Maya

Artikel Featured, Artikel Maya, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX, Artikel XMesh MY, Thinkbox Software ( @thinkboxsoft ) today announced the release of XMesh MY, a geometry caching plug-in for Autodesk® Maya®. Designed to streamline animation and visual effects production pipelines, XMesh is a set of tools for saving animated scene geometry in a condensed format that yields smaller files for faster loading, manipulation and sharing across facilities and applications. Also compatible with Autodesk® 3ds Max®, the robust and scalable multi-threaded solution allows artists to quickly open, share or receive computer generated (CG) assets from internal studio departments or external facilities.

>> See Also: XMesh MX Video Tutorial

“XMesh is the backbone of the interchange pipeline between 3ds Max and Maya at ScanlineVFX. It is fast, solid and the open structure allows the seamless integration into our pipeline,” said Christian Deiss, PipelineTD, ScanlineVFX.

Key features of XMesh include:

  - Accelerated Loading: By saving multiple animated meshes as a single entity, XMesh loads files orders of magnitude faster.
- Minimized Disk Space Usage: For each frame, XMesh saves multiple files - an XML header file referencing data channels and a compressed binary file per channel for optimizing disk space usage. Furthermore, unchanging channel data is saved once and can be referenced by later frames without duplication.
- Enhanced Multi-Core Performance: Each data channel is saved and loaded in a separate thread to provide advanced performance on multi-core machines.
- Parallel Saving: By allowing the same animated sequence to be saved on multiple network nodes, XMesh enables heavy scenes to be cached orders of magnitude faster.
- Quick Playback: With support for optional alternative mesh representation in the viewport, XMesh can play back files even faster via a low-resolution proxy file sequence. Viewport display modes that read only a fraction of data from disk – including bounding box, vertex cloud with percentage option and percentage of faces – further boost performance.
- Easy Information Transfer: XMesh preserves per-face material assignment information and supports the conversion of Maya edge smoothing information into 3ds Max smoothing groups and vice-versa, which provides an alternative to storing explicit normals.

“You can’t put a price on something that makes life much easier,” noted Will Wallace, Senior FX Artist, Hydraulx. “XMesh made things easy and did it right. We were able to bring objects in and out between packages with no worries. What XMesh can cache is mind blowing.”

An example of a rigged Maya character consisting of multiple objects exported as XMesh and loaded in 3ds Max. Model courtesy of Bryan Thombs.

I used XMesh on the ‘Hellraiser: Origins’ teaser recently, and loved it,” added Joël LeLièvre, CG Generalist/FX Artist, Delicate Machines. “It offered a robust, yet controllable approach to creating hundreds of digital extras in 3ds Max that would not have been possible without it. XMesh provided a caching system that allowed me to create over 600 animated characters in a matter of hours. XMesh is a beast!”

“Our artist-driven tools are designed to be as efficient and as flexible as possible, which frees the artist to focus on what they do best – create stunning visuals. XMesh continues this legacy by improving loading, saving and viewport performance,” explained Chris Bond, founder, Thinkbox Software. “Tasks that formerly took hours or minutes now take minutes or seconds – gains that multiply dramatically over the course of a job and allow artists to work more efficiently within Maya. Cross-platform support for 3ds Max means also makes it easy for artists to share files with other packages, facilities and within studios.”

XMesh MY supports Linux, OSX and Windows 64-bit operating systems and works with versions of Maya from 2011 through Maya 2014. Independent of the XMesh saver, the XMesh loader allows for free viewing and rendering of data. The XMesh saver license can be applied interchangeably to either Maya or 3ds Max. A version of the XMesh loader for The Foundry’s NUKE is currently in Beta.
To request an XMesh evaluation license or for more information, you can visit: http://xmesh.thinkboxsoftware.com/
  More Maya Plugin

Thinkbox Software ( @thinkboxsoft ) today announced the release of XMesh MY, a geometry caching plug-in for Autodesk® Maya®. Designed to streamline animation and visual effects production pipelines, XMesh is a set of tools for saving animated scene geometry in a condensed format that yields smaller files for faster loading, manipulation and sharing across facilities and applications. Also compatible with Autodesk® 3ds Max®, the robust and scalable multi-threaded solution allows artists to quickly open, share or receive computer generated (CG) assets from internal studio departments or external facilities.

>> See Also: XMesh MX Video Tutorial

“XMesh is the backbone of the interchange pipeline between 3ds Max and Maya at ScanlineVFX. It is fast, solid and the open structure allows the seamless integration into our pipeline,” said Christian Deiss, PipelineTD, ScanlineVFX.

Key features of XMesh include:

  - Accelerated Loading: By saving multiple animated meshes as a single entity, XMesh loads files orders of magnitude faster.
- Minimized Disk Space Usage: For each frame, XMesh saves multiple files - an XML header file referencing data channels and a compressed binary file per channel for optimizing disk space usage. Furthermore, unchanging channel data is saved once and can be referenced by later frames without duplication.
- Enhanced Multi-Core Performance: Each data channel is saved and loaded in a separate thread to provide advanced performance on multi-core machines.
- Parallel Saving: By allowing the same animated sequence to be saved on multiple network nodes, XMesh enables heavy scenes to be cached orders of magnitude faster.
- Quick Playback: With support for optional alternative mesh representation in the viewport, XMesh can play back files even faster via a low-resolution proxy file sequence. Viewport display modes that read only a fraction of data from disk – including bounding box, vertex cloud with percentage option and percentage of faces – further boost performance.
- Easy Information Transfer: XMesh preserves per-face material assignment information and supports the conversion of Maya edge smoothing information into 3ds Max smoothing groups and vice-versa, which provides an alternative to storing explicit normals.

“You can’t put a price on something that makes life much easier,” noted Will Wallace, Senior FX Artist, Hydraulx. “XMesh made things easy and did it right. We were able to bring objects in and out between packages with no worries. What XMesh can cache is mind blowing.”

An example of a rigged Maya character consisting of multiple objects exported as XMesh and loaded in 3ds Max. Model courtesy of Bryan Thombs.

I used XMesh on the ‘Hellraiser: Origins’ teaser recently, and loved it,” added Joël LeLièvre, CG Generalist/FX Artist, Delicate Machines. “It offered a robust, yet controllable approach to creating hundreds of digital extras in 3ds Max that would not have been possible without it. XMesh provided a caching system that allowed me to create over 600 animated characters in a matter of hours. XMesh is a beast!”

“Our artist-driven tools are designed to be as efficient and as flexible as possible, which frees the artist to focus on what they do best – create stunning visuals. XMesh continues this legacy by improving loading, saving and viewport performance,” explained Chris Bond, founder, Thinkbox Software. “Tasks that formerly took hours or minutes now take minutes or seconds – gains that multiply dramatically over the course of a job and allow artists to work more efficiently within Maya. Cross-platform support for 3ds Max means also makes it easy for artists to share files with other packages, facilities and within studios.”

XMesh MY supports Linux, OSX and Windows 64-bit operating systems and works with versions of Maya from 2011 through Maya 2014. Independent of the XMesh saver, the XMesh loader allows for free viewing and rendering of data. The XMesh saver license can be applied interchangeably to either Maya or 3ds Max. A version of the XMesh loader for The Foundry’s NUKE is currently in Beta.
To request an XMesh evaluation license or for more information, you can visit: http://xmesh.thinkboxsoftware.com/
  More Maya Plugin

Read more »

Krakatoa MY Beta With Magma

Artikel Featured, Artikel Krakatoa, Artikel Krakatoa MY, Artikel Maya, Artikel particle, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,
[ #Krakatoa #particle #VFX #Maya ]
Thinkbox Software ( @thinkboxsoft ) has announced that a Release Candidate build of Krakatoa MY 2.3 which contains a fully functional version of the Magma channel editing system is now available in the Thinkbox Krakatoa MY Beta forums.

The Magma channel editor lets you modify existing particle channels or create new ones using a fast and powerful node-based workflow. In addition to the usual operators performing arithmetic, trigonometry, data conversion, coordinate transformation and logical functions, it also includes tools for sampling data from other particle systems and performing ray intersections and nearest point look-ups using polygonal meshes.

>> See Also: Thinkbox Software Krakatoa MY For Autodesk Maya

Krakatoa Magma is implemented as a dedicated Maya node which can be connected to all supported Krakatoa particle sources including PRT objects and Maya Particles. In addition, the existing "Krakatoa Channel Modifiers" system has been significantly improved and can interact with channels generated by Magma.

Magma operations are currently strictly History-Independent, meaning that they are applied to the current frame's particle data without any knowledge of preceding frames' data. Magma operations are multi-threaded and are performed on native Krakatoa Particle Stream data instead of using the Maya particle data arrays. This contributes to the significantly higher performance of these operations.

Other new features included in Krakatoa MY 2.3 include:

-Support for PRT partitioning over Deadline.
-A new "PRT Surface" object type which creates particles on a mesh surface
-Option to set the number of threads that Krakatoa will use when rendering.
-Support for Deformers on Maya's particle and NParticle systems.
-Bug fixes, UI improvements, and Performance improvements.

  More about Krakatoa

[ #Krakatoa #particle #VFX #Maya ]
Thinkbox Software ( @thinkboxsoft ) has announced that a Release Candidate build of Krakatoa MY 2.3 which contains a fully functional version of the Magma channel editing system is now available in the Thinkbox Krakatoa MY Beta forums.

The Magma channel editor lets you modify existing particle channels or create new ones using a fast and powerful node-based workflow. In addition to the usual operators performing arithmetic, trigonometry, data conversion, coordinate transformation and logical functions, it also includes tools for sampling data from other particle systems and performing ray intersections and nearest point look-ups using polygonal meshes.

>> See Also: Thinkbox Software Krakatoa MY For Autodesk Maya

Krakatoa Magma is implemented as a dedicated Maya node which can be connected to all supported Krakatoa particle sources including PRT objects and Maya Particles. In addition, the existing "Krakatoa Channel Modifiers" system has been significantly improved and can interact with channels generated by Magma.

Magma operations are currently strictly History-Independent, meaning that they are applied to the current frame's particle data without any knowledge of preceding frames' data. Magma operations are multi-threaded and are performed on native Krakatoa Particle Stream data instead of using the Maya particle data arrays. This contributes to the significantly higher performance of these operations.

Other new features included in Krakatoa MY 2.3 include:

-Support for PRT partitioning over Deadline.
-A new "PRT Surface" object type which creates particles on a mesh surface
-Option to set the number of threads that Krakatoa will use when rendering.
-Support for Deformers on Maya's particle and NParticle systems.
-Bug fixes, UI improvements, and Performance improvements.

  More about Krakatoa

Read more »

Thinkbox Software Stoke MX 2.0 and Krakatoa MX 2.2

Artikel 3ds Max, Artikel Featured, Artikel Krakatoa, Artikel particle, Artikel Stoke, Artikel Thinkbox Software, Artikel VFX,

Thinkbox Software brings to Siggraph 2013 two new updates of its Plugin: particle reflow and field manipulation toolkit - Stoke MX 2.0 and particle point renderer and management toolkit - Krakatoa MX 2.2
>> Krakatoa tutorials
>> STOKE MX video Tutorials

New features in Stoke MX 2.0

-Stoke MX 2.0 extends upon the existing v1.0 feature set by including the complete Ember field editing toolset in one integrated package.
-Ember includes tools for creating, saving, loading, converting and manipulating volumetric data from various sources.
-Ember supports various popular file formats including FumeFX's native FXD files, Sony Imageworks open Field3D file format and DreamWorks' OpenVDB file format, the latter being used as the native volumetric data storage format of Stoke 2.0 with Ember technology.
-Ember continues the Asynchronous simulation tradition of Stoke MX 1.0, allowing large simulations to be processed on multiple background threads without blocking the user from doing other operations inside of 3DS Max.
-Ember adds support for volumetric and particle data flow through the Max modifier stack, allowing the conversion of mesh volumes to fields, fields to particles and so on using simple and familiar 3DS Max workflows.
-Ember provides both procedural, history-independent Velocity Field creation, and advanced history-dependent field simulation, based on the familiar Magma channel editing technology found in Krakatoa MX and Genome MX.
-Ember integrates with various sub-systems of Max, including MassFX rigid body simulations and mCloth through an Ember-specific Force Space Warp, with Particle Flow through a dedicated Ember Follow operator, with 3DS Max Materials via a Ember Texture map, and so on.

New features in Krakatoa MX 2.2

-Added Particle Repopulation to the PRT Cloner Modifier, exposing the features already available in Krakatoa MY and SR.
-PRT 1.1 file format I/O with Global and Per-Channel Metadata support. The same format is now supported by Krakatoa MY 2.2.0 and Krakatoa SR 2.2.0, allowing seamless transition between the coordinate systems and scales of 3DS Max, Maya and other implementations.
-Implemented Units conversion via Global Metadata - "LengthUnitInMeters" defines the file scale vs. 1 Generic Unit = 1 Meter scale.
-Implemented Coordinate System conversion via Global "CoordSys" Metadata value and per-channel "Interpretation" Metadata values specifying the channel's semantic meaning (Point, Vector, Orientation, Rotation etc.)
-Installer now supports 3DS Max 2014 64 bit.

Thinkbox Software confirmed that Stoke MX 2.0 is expected to enter Beta testing later this year, after Siggraph 2013. More information about Stoke MX 2.0 here and Krakatoa MX 2.2 here

Thinkbox Software brings to Siggraph 2013 two new updates of its Plugin: particle reflow and field manipulation toolkit - Stoke MX 2.0 and particle point renderer and management toolkit - Krakatoa MX 2.2
>> Krakatoa tutorials
>> STOKE MX video Tutorials

New features in Stoke MX 2.0

-Stoke MX 2.0 extends upon the existing v1.0 feature set by including the complete Ember field editing toolset in one integrated package.
-Ember includes tools for creating, saving, loading, converting and manipulating volumetric data from various sources.
-Ember supports various popular file formats including FumeFX's native FXD files, Sony Imageworks open Field3D file format and DreamWorks' OpenVDB file format, the latter being used as the native volumetric data storage format of Stoke 2.0 with Ember technology.
-Ember continues the Asynchronous simulation tradition of Stoke MX 1.0, allowing large simulations to be processed on multiple background threads without blocking the user from doing other operations inside of 3DS Max.
-Ember adds support for volumetric and particle data flow through the Max modifier stack, allowing the conversion of mesh volumes to fields, fields to particles and so on using simple and familiar 3DS Max workflows.
-Ember provides both procedural, history-independent Velocity Field creation, and advanced history-dependent field simulation, based on the familiar Magma channel editing technology found in Krakatoa MX and Genome MX.
-Ember integrates with various sub-systems of Max, including MassFX rigid body simulations and mCloth through an Ember-specific Force Space Warp, with Particle Flow through a dedicated Ember Follow operator, with 3DS Max Materials via a Ember Texture map, and so on.

New features in Krakatoa MX 2.2

-Added Particle Repopulation to the PRT Cloner Modifier, exposing the features already available in Krakatoa MY and SR.
-PRT 1.1 file format I/O with Global and Per-Channel Metadata support. The same format is now supported by Krakatoa MY 2.2.0 and Krakatoa SR 2.2.0, allowing seamless transition between the coordinate systems and scales of 3DS Max, Maya and other implementations.
-Implemented Units conversion via Global Metadata - "LengthUnitInMeters" defines the file scale vs. 1 Generic Unit = 1 Meter scale.
-Implemented Coordinate System conversion via Global "CoordSys" Metadata value and per-channel "Interpretation" Metadata values specifying the channel's semantic meaning (Point, Vector, Orientation, Rotation etc.)
-Installer now supports 3DS Max 2014 64 bit.

Thinkbox Software confirmed that Stoke MX 2.0 is expected to enter Beta testing later this year, after Siggraph 2013. More information about Stoke MX 2.0 here and Krakatoa MX 2.2 here

Read more »