Basefount, a company obsessed with animations, VFX technologies and software development, announced the release of Miarmy 4.5. Miarmy (read My Army) is a Human Logic Engine based Maya plugin for crowd simulation, AI & behavioral animation, creature physical simulation and rendering. Using Miarmy you can create human fuzzy logic network without any programming and node connecting supporting a standard production pipeline, reference, HumanIK and Motion Builder. Using the integration of PhysX: ragdoll, RBD emitters, force field, cloth, wind, fluid, you are able to create awesome crowd VFX using Maya particles, field, fluid and transform. The new version comes with some new special features and improves lots of features already seen in the previous versions of Miarmy. Between the new features belongs a new jump system allowing agents to jump among the trees in the forest. It’s therefore easy to create randomize actions of climb and jump and also allowing us to determine which trees the agents can jump on or not. The best of it at the end, Miarmy 4.5 is free of charge forever.

Few days ago, Sitni Sati has released FumeFX 4.0 for Autodesk's Maya platform. FumeFX is a fluid dynamics engine designed for simulation and rendering of realistic fire, smoke, explosion and other gaseous phenomena. Basically, if you want to put something on fire, this is the tool for it. The engine features a very intuitive and robust workflow making it a perfect solution for the most demanding tasks in the computer graphics industry. The core engine allows user to interfere with simulation computation at the lowest level. It’s available for both Autodesk’s 3ds max and Maya. The new version offers many new features that help simulations to run faster and with more detail. Between the new features belongs QCG solver which is up to twice as fast as the CG solver found in FumeFX 3.0. Along with other enhancements and simulation optimizations, FumeFX 4.0 is generally faster in all kind of simulation present inside the engine than the previous versions.

New vorticity type has additional control over vortices which helps user to fine tune the final result. The highly optimized Spline Follow force field allows various special effects that were impossible before. A new Black-body radiation shader and new burning model that includes Oxygen has been built-in for achieving realistic fire and explosion animations. Additional sharpening options directly at render-time will bring out maximum possible detail from your existing caches. An optimized and fully multithreaded cache pre-processing will result in significant time savings across the render farms.

RandomControl, the developer of Arion a physically based CPU & GPU render engine, announced the relaease of a new version of ArionFX for Photoshop. ArionFX for Photoshop is a versatile tool that offers a variety of key HDR image processing algorithms designed to function in floating-point 32-bit HDR data. ArionFX allows the implementing inside the existing pipeline and so keeping a linear workflow. The plugin brings a new advanced HDR tonemapping, firefly removal, glare, bloom and so on. Between the most noticeable postproduction options available inside ArionFX belongs the possibility of removing speckles and on the other hand adding some grain. The HDR despeckler tool features a high-performance removal algorithm which works similarly to Photoshop's native Dust and scratches filter, but in 32-bit HDR. HDR film grain adds what his name stands for, a fancy film grain.

After releasing of Autodesk 3ds max 2016 Cebas visual technology announced the release of thinkingParticles 6.1 compatible with the newest version of 3ds max. thinkingParticles™ is one of the leading plugins widely known for its fully procedural and physically accurate, real world destruction and special effects simulations in the movie industry. The sixth generation of thinkingParticles fully supports procedural fluid dynamics and soft body simulations and covers almost any possible scenarios of, what is known as, the "multi-physics" effect. As with every new major release, new functions and enhancements have been added to thinkingParticles. The plugin comes with a dedicated Fluid Simulation System, empowering the creation of evermore realistic and diverse on-screen fluid effects. thinkingParticles are comaptible with all 3ds max version starting at 3ds Max Design 2013 and ending at the latest release, 3ds max 2016.