Plugin

Nvidia has released a nice little video showing off some of the new APEX Turbulence features of its PhysX physics system, using footage from the free-to-play mech shooter Hawken.

Unlike the SPH-like (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) systems commonly used in games, APEX Turbulence is a grid-based fluid solver, and calculates only surface turbulence and velocity fields.

Procedural rendering is now supported in Golaem Crowd 2.2, just released by the Golaem crew. Solid Angle's Arnold renderer enables some pretty fast rendering and simulation independent geometry and shader actions.

The software lets animators create crowd shots using familiar tools such as particle systems – as opposed to the AI-based approach of packages like Massive – and is in use at studios including Zoic and Mikros Image.

SplineLand is a plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max that helps to generate topographically accurate terrains from a set of splines and lay roads. Without SplineLand it is almost impossible to achieve such accurate results in 3ds Max. You can do it quickly, in just a few clicks your topographical data in form of splines can become a terrain.

Splines can be topographic contours in one plane each, or can be just any shape.

XrayUnwrap and XrayBlendSkin creator Raylight has announced XrayCat Survival Toolkit. This new plugin designed to speed up workflow in 3ds Max’s CAT character animation system.

The tool adds shortcuts for the most common tasks when setting up a rig, plus new Layer and Clip Managers – the latter useful for backing up CAT layers and applying them to a new rig.

There is also a new Pose Manager, which enables users to “copy and paste poses [in Animation Mode], mirror the rig, swap arms, hands, legs and feet with only one mouse click.”