Stoke MX, a new plugin for 3ds Max

 

 

 

 

Thinkbox Software, known for its Krakatoa particle processing, manipulation and management tools, has announced its new product Stoke MX.

This is a plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max particle simulator designed to simplify and accelerate the creation of high volume particle clouds driven by velocity fields.

The company defines it as an easy and fast tool that supports a large number of emitters and sources and introduces new workflows. These include simulations from FumeFX (from Sitni Sati) and the Ember plugin (from Thinkbox, which is still in beta), Particle Flow, thinkingParticles, Force Space Warps from 3ds Max and formats such as PRT or BIN from RealFlow.

In addition, it is designed to work seamlessly with other Thinkbox products, such as Krakatoa, Frost (version 1.3.5 or higher), Genome and Ember.

Key features include:

• Fast generation of particles from other particle systems, geometric surfaces, volumes, vertices and edges, including support for selection and soft selection.

• Optional acquisition of the transmitter channel with minimum overload.

• Field velocity mixing, scaling and optional divergence removal from particle-based velocity fields to produce fluid motion without compression.

• Flexible caching for fast simulation iterations and interactive playback of the graphics window.

• Saving PRT files using one or more background threads, decoupling the simulation from the particle saving process for even faster iterations.

• Extensive MAXScript exposure that allows the creation of custom Stoke-based tools.

• Compatible with the Thinkbox Krakatoa MX high-volume particle processor and its various components.

Stoke MX enables significantly higher throughput compared to existing workflows. It can be used to speed up particle creation by using velocities defined in an original particle to drive a similar motion with many more particles in Stoke. Thinkbox claims that performing this Stoke process can be up to 7 times faster than using the original simulation software.

Due to Stoke MX’s asynchronous caching system, the benefits are potentially greater when particles are emitted and saved to PRT files. According to Thinkbox, saving a 100-frame simulation, with one million particles emitted in Particle Flow and written to disk using the Krakatoa partition, takes 160 seconds, compared to 5.5 seconds for Stoke MX with 2GB of cache.

In this video you can see the example with more or less dense particle creations and the time it took.

The basic Stoke MX package includes one workstation license and two network licenses. Additional network licenses can be purchased individually. From here you can request a 15-day evaluation license, or more information (including price).

On this page you will find all available information and tutorials about Stoke MX.