Sitni Sati, makers of Afterburn and FumeFX for 3DS Max have announced the release of FumeFX 3.0. Notable upgrades to this latest release are Effectors, Render Warps, N-Sim, and the announcement that FumeFX is being developed for Maya. You can read the full details on the Afterworks website.
FumeFX 3.0 released
Related Posts
Popular Stories
CGPress is an independent news website built by and for CG artists. With more than 15 years in the business, we are one of the longest-running CG news organizations in the world. Our news reporting has gathered a reputation for credibility, independent coverage and focus on quality journalism. Our feature articles are known for their in-depth analyses and impact on the CG scene. “5 out of 5 artists recommend it.”
I felt my heart broken when I read the fumeFX for Maya part
Really sad for max seats in maya based studios, but good business sense for Sitni Sati, thats for sure.
Some great new features to play with IMO 🙂
Sitni Sati brougth a value to the exclusivity of fumefx for 3dsmax…Now they are trying to claim market dominance..They succumbed to the consumer in this case when proper managment and great marketing could make the consumer come to you…In my opinion this is just a shortcut to selling the same product at a faster rate…In the long run they could have sold just as many seats without the extra work of a port while keeping exclusivity as a selling point…
it is funny to see how many plugins from Max get ported to Maya, and none of Maya plugins get ported to max. Despite the fact that the sales numbers of Max licenses (i can read it in our books) are multiplied by 10, at least. This means the money is not the reason to sit down and dig in the ugly maya SDK for months. There must be something more, something esoteric and promising that push us to port plugins to maya.
I wish to see one day PaintTools from Maya ported to max.
At least one VFX studio had their own Fume cache reader so simulations could be done with Max, but lighting and rendering done with the studio’s Maya pipeline. Like VRay, there was a demand for FumeFX integration as a whole into Maya and now it’s here. It’ll be interesting to see how this will be received.
It’s a tough question and one we wrestle with. There are certainly more max seats, but we can all agree that many of the major VFX players are a Linux/Maya pipeline [Scanline, Pixomondo, Blur, SHG, Atomic Ficiton and others are the exceptions]
We can make our tools as awesome as possible, and yeah, sometimes the non-MAX houses make our stuff work here and there – but it’s a rebel unit. Thus it is something everyone eventually points at as a bottleneck/production problem because of incompatibility with the pipeline or just because it’s not what they are used to.
I don’t want to start a flame war – but this *is* a *business* and when I am confronted with an opportunity to sell 500 seats of Krakatoa to a single large VFX facility – the effort to port starts to make sense.
That being said – I have a personal love with MAX and as our release today demonstrates, we aren’t moving away from MAX and we aren’t ‘losing’ key development time while we explore stand-alone options.
IF ANYTHING – we are growing stronger, adding staff and developing better foundations because we are looking at other platforms.
So IMHO – good for Sitni Sati for porting. I hope it drives more revenue for them so they can continue to innovate. For us – we’ll do what our clients want: you tell us. You buy our software and demand other kickass tools for MAX or Standalone tools or integration into MS Paint – we’ll consider it. We have a vision for the future and an aggressive roadmap…but ultimately the bottom line is that our only goal is our client’s success.
cheers
cb
To touch on the Maya thing… when I first read that FumeFX was being ported to Maya I was a bit concerned. Being a small, self-run company I can say that a good portion of my most recent jobs have been using certain Max-based tools in conjunction with Maya pipelines. Max has always had solid plugins which is a big reason why I still use Max today. Over the years I have seriously considered multiple times switching to XSI (pre-Autodesk), and even Maya for one reason or another, but decided against it because I was able to assemble my own toolset using Max as a base, and adding on plugins as needed.
I have noticed over the past ~2 years that a great deal of the fx jobs I go after are Maya studios looking for artists with particle experience using Max, specifically for FumeFX and Krakatoa. It may seem a bit concerning that these tools are being released as standalone products and ports to Maya, but on the bright side now I can potentially increase my client base. Heck, after using FumeFX and Krakatoa since v 1.0, I have a 5 year jump on everyone else so I hope that counts for something. Being able to use the same tool and carry that knowledge to 2 or more packages can only increase your potential to get more work I think. I am looking forward to the possiblity of more fx work using tools that I already know well, even if the work reqiures me to work in a Maya UI. I was will always feel at home in Max, but sometimes you have to leave the nest.
I think, like all things, we have to evolve and remain flexible. If the developers have the opportunity to branch out and earn more revenue by porting their products, so be it. My hope is that it will enable them to create and release even better tools down the road.
Exclusivity is BS. I’d much rather wish success to people like Kresimir an Chris Bond (and all the other people at Thinkbox who are doing simply amazing job with their products) then hope to keep them in a closed little world 🙂 Let’s take the ride, see what happens 🙂
Btw, new Fume features are kickass!
Still it’s a lot of work to keep two platforms alive… so let’s hope for the best and that the renaissance of max plugins (after some very silent years of development and innovation) doesn’t stop 🙂
I just wanted to throw my 2cents. It’s a real challenge to develop 1 consistent product for different platforms. It takes a lot of work and lots of testing. Hats off to the Chaos Group developers!
FumeFX 3 is a great update.