Pulldownit 4 for 3ds max has been released and comes with several new powerful features you can see in action in the technical reel below.

The whole plugin has been updated and tuned for better performance and usability, fracture solver is around 30% faster and we have took our time to fix a few stability issues of previous verison, all of this makes this new release more responsive and with faster iterations.

Pulldownit plugin is fully integrated in 3ds Max and destruction scenes can be exported to other platforms using Fbx or Alembic formats, adding its range of features makes PDI a valuable resource when working in either VFX or Motion Graphics projects.

Below listed the most relevant highlights in Pulldownit 4 for 3ds Max.

Shatter New Features

New Adquire Shatter style, new style to transfer a current shatter pattern and animation to another object, by using it you can apply the same destruction effect to a version of the model with different shaders applied or to a hi-poly version of the same model.

Shatter based in volume shape, now you can use any polygonal shape to constraint the shatter effect to its contour, this is especially useful when shattering based on an impact object.

Jagginess( v2.0) independent of tessellation, new Jaggy method is independent of the original mesh tessellation, getting much lighter jaggy fragments when the object is hi-poly, and removing the artifacts caused in borders of high tessellated models.

New soften edges UI parameter for Jagginess. New parameter to adjust soften of jaggy edges to get the amount of roughness desired in inner faces. In addition new soften method removes visible seems on inner borders from previous method.

New option to apply jaggines to broken fragments only, using this option for non-moving fragments you can apply jagginess only to the areas which has been broken in simulation, getting much lighter meshes for rendering or real time games.

Dynamics New Features

Speed up Fractures solver 30%, PDI dynamic solver has been very fast since its first version, in this latest release you will experiment faster iterations when working in dynamics.

New ability to pull apart pieces of an animated object at desired frame, besides activating rigid bodies at first hit you can now set the frame when they become active and if the bodies are linked to an animated object they adquire the velocity of its parent.

Reset keeps selected, you can now bake keys only for selected fractures and rigid bodies, letting the rest to continue being driven by simulation, baked fractures can still interact with other objects by setting the animated fragments as kinematic bodies.

Animatable Fracture Parameters, new fBodyAnim modifier allows to animate fracture hardness, friction and bounciness values during simulation.

Cluster break energy is now independent of body mass/scale, we have removed break energy dependency on mass and scale making more intuitive exploding fragments at desired frame.

Read the full list of fixes in the Pulldownit web site version logs