Cebas Visual Technology has announced the release of Thinking Particles subscription Drop 8 which adds 35 new OpenVDB operators. The new release promises that users will be able to “easily import Volumetric data created in other applications to thinkingParticles for a much more easier and advanced Visual Effects treatment inside of 3DS Max”. Features include:
- Integration of OpenVDB, allowing the user to create, share, and import VDB volumes 100% procedurally.
- Real-time Volume Field Interaction inside 3dsmax and the ability to work natively with volumetric data.
- Fully multi-threaded volume grid access
- Real-time tP smoke & fluid solvers / simulations
- State-of-the-art procedural sphere packing
- True Volumetric Multi-Threaded packing with Full Access to Every Single Volume Data.
- Advanced OpenVDB Multi-Physics: Fluid & Volume Interaction Fully Multi-Threaded.
- High Performance Deforming Volume Mesh Boundary with Surface to Velocity Transfer and Water Tight Volume Boundaries.
In addition to OpenVDB support this release also updates the fluid solver to improve stability, speed and control. Improvements in Fluid Solver 8 include:
- Improved ultra-thin water sheeting.
- Improved responsivity and higher volume conservation.
- Enhanced pressure transfer stable vorticity.
Thinking Particles is compatible with Max 2018 to 2020 and is available for annual subscription at $660 per year and a free trial is available. To see a full list of the improvements in this release, visit Cebas’ website.
Finally a complete VDB toolset in 3dsmax. Thanks Cebas!
TP again opens the doors to a whole new world in Max!
I wonder why plugins like this still exists when there’s houdini
Maybe you should try both. I “switched” to Hou two years ago. I am still missing practicality of TP. Much much easier to do some stuff and on other hand impossible to do some stuff you can do in Hou. All solvers works together. In Hou, uhmmmm not so much. Particle VEX based works together smootly tho. When you grasp the Thinking of TP, thanks to Joe, Hristo, Sergey, Goran and Eloi you will have solid foundation that can be applied anywhere even in Hou. Concept is the same. As someone said, Max and Maya are 3d programs, Hou is more like a 3D operating system. TP is a plugin for dynamics not a complete 3d package like Hou.
I like to use houdini but honestly the vfx market needs to be alive and active with competion.
Pena,
Yours is a legit question and I don’t read anything wrong in it.
I’ve used 3ds Max for years and I simply loved it. I also always looked at TP with envy for all the beautiful things artist could create with it. Eventually, I went back to C4D mostly because of my job in the motion graphics industry.
The introduction is to give some background to the changes here on CGPress. I really don’t understand the need to introduce this horrible, trivial, useless, stupid, dumb voting system. FB and other social media have proved to be detrimental enough for people’s brain. Does CGPress really need to mimic their useless social-dumb tools? I don’t think so. The down votes on your simple question proves it. I wonder who are those idiots who down voted your question. I mean, really, what for???
CGpress editors, if you’re reading this, please, get rid of this useless feature. Don’t pave the way to idiotic behaviors. THANKS!
Hi Marco,
We appreciate your feedback. We considered a number of options when picking a new comment system, chief amongst them being that we did not want your data to be harvested by 3rd parties.
The system we chose keeps all user data on CGPress’ servers where we do precisely nothing to try and monetise it 🙂
Along with this new system came a couple of other slightly social aspects that include the like/dislike options.
We have checked and we can disable them, but before we do, I would like to hear from others to get more of a consensus view.
What do people think? Likes and disklikes, do you want them? Should we remove them? Let us know.
Thanks!
@CGPress Staff, Thanks for chiming in.
I still don’t understand the need for the likes feature. In which way is supposed to improve CGPress? It doesn’t affect the quality of the articles as, obviously, that depends on your job. It doesn’t improve the dialogues in the comment section as likes or dislikes can’t add much to what words express. It’s a dull, hollow system which, in many cases, it’s used by users who don’t take actually part to the conversation or, if they do, there isn’t much left to add from a system of +1 -1. The most annoying situation is when someone asks or states something plain and simple and yet, you see those dislikes. It truly doesn’t make any sense. In fact, if someone would tell me it’s just a random feedback generated by a machine I could easily believe it, as, from a rational standpoint, it’s the least meaningful thing in the human history.
Lastly, likes can have a psychological detrimental effect. Hope you will really re-consider it.
The developer community is upgrading 3dsmax again. Thanks, Cebas!
great product!! horrible video marketing! you should put some efforts on making better more professional presentation
I find curious how they support Autodesk (and Autodesk practices) by supporting just to the versions officially supported by Autodesk, unlike other plugins that give support from version 2014 or 2015, they support just 2018,2019 and 2020, the old versions users must comply with Autodesk or don’t use Thinking Particles…
Is not to support or not Autodesk. I think its an error to compare TP with “other plugins”. Tp adds every year new features that could be by themself 1 or 2 plugins. Some of them:
-Complete SC RBD voxel system, with joints etc.
-Complete Bullet implementation with joints, ropes, softbodies.
-Physx
-Cars and boats based on Bullet.
-Splines toolset, physics splines, procedural spline creation, long etc.
-Complete VDB implementation.
-SPH solver
-Smoke solver
-Point renderer
-All purpose fields.
-Bin importers, PRT importers, also his own alembic exporter, mesh exporters, 2 cache systems.
-Volumebreak system.
-Multiple connections to 3dsmax. Dynamic geometry population lists, UDP reading, Custom attributes readers, etc…
-Analysis tools…
-And I stop here but I could go with a way longer list. What I mean, is that this could be ship as 15 different plugins easily, but its all in one single ecosystem. TP is not like other plugins where they have one single focus, they do some upgrades on the existing core + porting it to new releases. Being part of the beta process I see how much things could break between different versions of max, being TP so tight to different max core features.
Im one of the affected by not being able to use the latest TP version, but knowing the incredible new features Cebas adds release over release with the few resources they have, I will prefer they focus in the latest 3 max releases, other than having in mind create compatibility with more max versions and less new features.
The thing is that many people left the abusive licenses from Autodesk, so many people are using older versions, other complex plugins, like TyFlow, support oler versions, showing support to those users could be a good thing, and it’s not that hard to make previous versions compilations, even if they have to limit some feature, that I don’t think so.
All the features you mentioned are good, but they depend on the plugin, not on max libraries, so no reason to avoid supporting older versions.
I’m not criticizing their support for the latest 3 major versions, but what I see here is that they are in line with Autodesk policies, in the same way they showed they were in line jumping as fast as they could into subscription.
Didn’t they go on subscription to be able to give more and better continuous support? They should be able to support previous versions thanks to their rental model that theoretically would give them more ability to give not just more features continuously but better support.
Not so long ago TP was working on 2017, and suddenly they cannot support it, it’s not a technical reason.
Is not simply limiting versions. And again the comparision with Tyflow is unfair. Some TP deep integration with max:
-layertoparticle lets you read dynamically layers and objects in max.
-Objto particle lets you load none dynamically layers, objects and layersets.
-the bothabove has the equivalent data nodes to stop tracking animation dynamically.
-Paramblock lets you read/write any object and modifier parameter procedurally in max.
-Nodeattributes lets you read any 3dsmax object information. wirecolor, links, customdata, etc.
-vertoparticle lets you track and deform your 3dsmax object based on particles driven in TP.
-Particledraw uses the 3dsmax brush to draw particles in tp (this has been changed over versions.
-editonthefly that controls all particles to be driven on the fly has been affected by changes on 2017 and on, with an added 3dsmax caching to speed up motion changes.
-valuetovalue uses multiple curve UI taken from max, like other nodes.
-TP is accessible via maxscript and needs to be updated version to version.
And there is much more. Tyflow is great, but there is not of any deep integration with max (for the good and for the bad), so its easy to port it around. I have seen all this above been broken or stop working depending the 3dsmax version, and for whatever you want to say, its not trivial to fix this things having to track it in to multiple 3dsmax versions.
Is not true we (the users of tp) saw no change since they switch to a rental model. Im using TP since version 4, and an update before was around 2 years. Now we get the same number of new features every 6-8 months, so for me is a huge difference. As you know any company has limited resoures, I will like new features every month plus retrocompatibility with the last 6 3dsmax, but this is not possible and sacrifices has to be made.