Thinkinetic has released Pulldownit 4.5 for Maya, the latest version of its shatter and destruction plugin. New features include:
- A new utility that spreads Maya nParticles over faces per material, enabling the user to emit extra debris, dust or smoke only from chosen faces.
- Heavy animated meshes are now up to 3x times faster to update in dynamics. Animated or deforming meshes such as character`s skin are now updated quickly to provide a smoother experience when including them in destruction scenes.
- A new “Increase Selection” option makes it easier to create clusters by selecting groups of small fragments. The tool selects neighbouring fragments in the same area with one click.
- A new “Only Breaks” fracture option captures larger cracks and detachments, this useful feature forces the model to stand while being impacted, its behaviour has been improved so now it can generate larger cracks and detachments when they don’t jeopardize the overall structure.
- Fracture Body Friction, Bounciness, Sec Cracks and Damping parameters can now be animated to give the user more control over a fracture simulation. In addition, these settings plus Mass parameters can also be animated for more control over rigid bodies simulations.
- Users now have the ability to change a propagation scheme at a specific frame For example, a user can damage an object locally and then change to continuous propagation at a specified frame to break it completely.
- There is a new option to show/hide/select all the disabled rigid bodies in scene.
- A new Aquire Shatter function can transfer animation from a single shape node to multi shape nodes.
Pulldownit costs €395. Find out more on the Thinkinetic blog and watch a tutorial featuring several of the new features by Esteban Cuesta on Vimeo.
