It’s not an April Fool’s day prank, Tyson Ibele today announced the open beta of TyFlow, his eagerly awaited unofficial PFlow replacement that aims to “bring Max back to the 21st century”. You can download the plugin now from the new documentation website where you’ll also find help on it’s various operators and workflow. The beta is open to everyone, fully functional, and can even be used commercially.
A number of sample files are also available to download to help users get up and running with the features. If you haven’t been following the news, here’s a reminder about what Tyflow promises:
- PFlow operators have been recreated and are all fully multithreaded.
- In addition, many new operators have been added, including a granular solver, cloth, rope, proper path follow, DLA growth, constraints, and more
- A spline operator and fast spline meshing modifier for converting particle trajectories, neighbours, constraints etc. into spline meshes.
- Up-to-date PhysX support.
- Voronoi fracture, brick fracture, boolean fracture, convex decomposition etc, all built-in.
- All of PFlow’s O(n^2) operations have been properly accelerated (mesh collisions, nearest neighbour searches, surface lock/bond, etc)
- No more hidden PFlow operator/event nodes in the scene to manage, each flow is fully self-contained.
- Extra control has been added to all the base operators, and each operator has timing activation controls.
- A C# script operator that executes nearly as fast as native c++ and that supports multithreaded scripts.
- VRay instance rendering support, GPU instancing in the viewport (easily display 100s of millions of polys in the view no problem).
- Super fast auto-caching, similar to the way Houdini caches things on the fly.
- PhoenixFD grid support, PRT import/export.
- Simulation retiming.
- A custom file caching system that is often hundreds/thousands times smaller in file size than alternative systems like xMesh.
- Automatic realtime timeline caching,
- A fast and OpenCL-accelerated constraint solver for simulating grains/cloth/rope/etc
- Built-in tools to convert particle trajectories, neighbors and constraints into dynamic splines
- Supports simulation cascading for fast particle initialization and hierarchical caching
- Built-in crowd simulation tools
- Dynamic mesh breaking and fracturing operators
- Multithreaded C# scripting support for complete particle control
- Built-in PRT/object/cache export.
- Integrated with Nitrous and supports viewport instancing
- Integrated with VRay and supports render instancing
- Integrated with Deadline for batching exports onto a renderfarm.
No news yet on the duration of the open beta or the expected price once it’s released, but we’ll be sure to share more once the information is available. You can also see a public roadmap on Trello. Find out more about Tyflow on its documentation site.
Oh nice! This is a super and very generous way of approaching this release. Thanks to the dev!
Apologies ahead of time if the start of this beta is a bit of a bumpy ride…some users are reporting weird scaling issues on 4K monitors, and startup errors with certain installations of VRay. Thanks for your patience while I work to fix these bugs! 🙂
Thanks for the heads up, I’ll wait for that 4k fix before trying out.
Congrats on the release of the beta Tyson, it´s a big step forward!
As our grandparents say, “after the storm, there will always be sunrise” … we were frustrated again by renting our work tool at an extremely expensive price (in few words: “3dsmax 2020”)
But as always some little miracles happen from random awesome heroes.
and that miracles includes you, my sweet friend jungle3d. hehe… You was always our vegetarian brother who even inside a steakhouse party, warns us that it is bad to eat meat .. 😀 … but, i confess…. because of you I started to use the blender. and I sincerely apologize for being rude in the past. I’ve been following your videos. Thanks.
And sorry my english also. i really liked your videos and i started to understand your motivations and your reasons.
And BTW I’m glad you like the videos, I have to do more in English, but I don’t have enough time, if you have any suggestions, please go ahead, but better in the video comments section, not here hahaha 🙂
No harsh feelings!
We all have feelings about the tools we use and when someone tell us something that we don´t like we may become emotional, it´s totally normal IMHO, we dedicate a big part of our life to that tool, or to other tools, so it’s hard to hear things we don´t like, being that true or not.
I also had many arguments with Eloi, and I respect him a lot, and I have to personally talk to him about other things, so don´t worry! hehehe.
This is a “forum” where we all can talk., I want to inform about the things I want to inform, but I don’t have any bad feelings about any of you, no matter if you support me or you criticize me or my opinions 🙂
Cheers!
Works fine here on 4K, with 100% scaling though…
… and… looks and behaves orgasmic…!
This is the greatest news! After many years, I’ll finally install 3ds Max again! Very excited! Thanks for the open beta.
I fail to figure out how to load a flow via the cache object.. or maybe I don’t export it properly..
Nonono, thank YOU Tyson, for your great contributions to the max comunity.
A dream come true.
“No more hidden PFlow operator/event nodes in the scene to manage, each flow is fully self-contained.”
Newer versions of max they were no longer hidden, but created a giant mess in your layer explorer. Glad TyFlow does not do this.
Thats for me the most frustration thing in pflow (there are much others), when I ask why create all this dumb helpers per node, the response was… Thats a user request,…. sometimes people request weird things. Cant wait to play with tflow!
I’m wondering if they requested that to expose things easier for wiring or scripting? An option to turn it on if wanted would have been helpful for us that wouldn’t need it.
Tyflow. Wow amazing features.
I guess Autodesk will buy this plugin asap and integrate it into 3dsmax slowly. Very slowly to make 3dsmax development look like its making progress. 🙂
Still remember naiad and their slow bifrost integration into maya and 3dsmax. Still in progress i guess. not fully featured yet.
Lets hope this will never happen. AD – keep your greedy hands of this masterpiece!
Yeah, please never ever sell this to Autodesk! NEVER!
First impression is that this thing is FAST. Stupidly fast compared to Particle Flow! Looking forward to play with this thing!
Big thanks for this open beta Tyson!
Works as expected, the only issue I have is with my 4K monitor, but that is going to be solved I guess 🙂
Also, please don’t sell this to Autodesk, the moment you do that, the development of tyFlow will end like it did with CAT, Cloth, pFlow, Hair&Fur and more. All they will do is to update it’s SDK for newer versions of max, and that would be devestating!
In other hand If he not sell it than Autodesk want have another “break through” in comming 2021 update 😀
I would say. Make a perfect plugin – earn money. Sell it to Autodesk for even more money. Then rewrite hair&Fur/cloth/ or what ever… etc. 😉 there is lots of stuff to repair 😀
Amazing
i think the logo needs the vertical stem back in the ‘F’ or else it reads ‘TY LOW’ or ‘TY=LOW’ 🙂
I am so glad this is not an April’s fools joke 🙂 Thank you Tyson!
Unbelievable! I waited a long time before seeing this news on the cgscene and I am really surprised that you give free access to your tools! It’s really a very good news! Thanks a lot! I’ll be the first to buy it when it comes out
This is really great! First thing I’ve noticed, besides it being fast: Retiming the particle system is already integrated in the UI, awesome!
It’s great! Thank you more development, Tyson!
WOW!
I wish this would work on max 2014 but totally understand. What an amazing plugin. Congratulations for getting this to the beta stage.
Totally with you on this, its a shame because 2014 is still a staple at many places – but understandable given the time/hassle/costs involved. Maybe such witchcraft is not even possible on our version..
what about if we all 3ds max community put you on a pay roll so you can rewrite 3ds max entirely? please! you can call it TyMax or something…
we should make this a serious discussion, like seriously
you’d probably need to get the IP from Autodesk. Good luck with that. And who knows what AD will do, once they realize that there is interest in max?
Can you create a software that is fully compatible with max but it is not max?
A software that adopts the good things about max but does not necessary has to look the exact way as max does but it reads 3ds max’s mind under the hood perfectly 🙂
Honestly if you allow companies to switch their 3ds max pipelines to other package with minimal effort or no effort at all, and for a cheaper option, why not? I would switch tomorrow 🙂
I’m sure its possible – just look at all the photoshop ‘clones’ out there – many of which are compatible with Pshop plugins. I’m pretty sure the modifier stack concept has been adopted elsewhere.. whether is feasible is a different matter. Nice pipe-dream though.
Did you guys ever install Blender? 😉
I would love to rewrite max. BUt need an investor, cause I have mouths to feed.
oh my god,thanks for sharing this to us,you are the savior of max
This quote
Reminds of all the times I saw particle flow code embedded in places completely irrelevant: lIke maxscript kernal code. I remember thinking, what the heck is that doing here???