Hum3D Withoutborders challenge 2021 winners announced!, congratulations to all of them.
As sponsor of the competition Thinkinetic is proud to award with a Pulldownit Pro license to the winners among other amazing prizes.
take a look to best images and interviews with winners in the official announcement:Visit Challenge Home Page
Ideaform3d has published a nice tutorial showcasing Pulldownit new bounded cracks feature. The tutorial shows step by step how to create a crack along a Moai statue all inside Maya 2022 using PDI plugin,
Project files can be downloaded by clicking in the link included in the text of the tutorial below,
Ideaform3d is a youtube channel featuring nice and easy to follow tutorials showcasing useful plugins and scripts for Maya, 3dsMax and After Effects, worth to check it!
Pulldownit 5 for Maya is here! and brings important updates in performance and usability, fractures solver now computes at least 2 times faster and gets more debris in impact areas without the need of further adjustment.
Create long surface cracks is now much easier, a new ability to shatter along part of a curve, lets user refine the crack as many as needed in a visual way. Reversing dynamics cracks involves just one click, besides surface cracks can be bounded, so broken fragments are forced to stick on the surface or fall as desired.
Jagginess, the nice ability to add roughness to cut faces, receives also an important update, by default roughness now only applies to broken areas in simulation, getting much lighter meshes for rendering or when exporting it to game engines.
There are several other performance and usability improvements you can review below and you can check the whole list of fixes in the Pulldownit version logs page:
Read the full list of fixes in the Pulldownit web site version logs
Licensed users can access already Pulldownit 5 from his account and there is a demo version for Maya 2022 in the Thinkinetic web site.
Shatter New Features
New Extent parameter for Shatter it tool, this new parameter allows to shrink the shatter region in a visual way, making very easy to increase the density of fragments in any area of the model.
New ability to exclude part of the curve in Shatter it Draft Mode, simply by dragging the mouse you can select the extent of the curve to be used for shattering, as many times as needed, therefore one single curve is enough for all reshattering operations.
Jagginess applies to broken fragments only, by default Jaggines now only applies to the areas which has been broken in simulation, getting much lighter meshes for rendering or exporting it to game engines.
Dynamic New Features
PDI Fracture Solver 2x faster, scenes involving hundreds or thousands of fragments in dynamics now computes at least 2 times faster with the same stability than previous version.
Improved quality of Fracture solver, cracks are now more realistic pulling out small fragments in borders of impact or detaching areas without the need of further adjustment.
New bounded behaviour for crackers, user can now control the distance detached fragments can move, from making them stick on the surface to let them free and falling.
New Add Particles option “Visible Faces Only”, when combining fragments to emit from, this new option spread nParticles only over the visible faces of the combined node.
UI Enhancements
Load PDI scenes 2x faster, massive destruction scenes now load at least 2 times faster in Maya.
New ability to reverse Cracker direction, reverse a dynamic crack is now as easy as click on the panel button.
New option to update Cracker Path when user changes reference curve.
Create fracture body 4x faster, fracture bodies made of thousands fragments now needs only a few seconds to be created by PDI solver.
Stresses view “break at frame” clusters are now displayed in green color, when in Stress View user can differentiate easily clusters set to break at frame( green) from the rest.
Create fracture cluster is now an almost instant operation.
Pulldownit , the destruction plugin, is already available for 3d Max 2022, this update includes latest bug fixes you can read in the Pulldownit version logs pages,
visit pulldownit version log pages
3d Max 2022 brings quite a few of improvements and revamped features, in the modelling field, extrude, symmetry, slice and relax modifiers are more powerful and user friendly, smart extrude is now supported by edit poly which speed up greatly the workflow when modeling, and it comes with a new ability to auto create holes just by pushing selected polygons away absolutely fantastic.
Since version 2021 Autodesk has been improving viewports quality and usability in each update, in this latest release they add a borderless clean floating viewport ideal for presentations.
Bake to Texture has been receiving multiple updates during last year, and in version 2022 it supports common maps: Beauty, Color, Metalness, Roughness, and several others maps are now directly handle in the Bake to Texture dialog along with its Gamma settings.
New policy of Autodesk is to introduce features and improvements progressively along the year, given the powerful retopology tools added in update 3, a few months ago, the whole picture looks like a much powerful and user friendly 3ds Max for modeling and visualization tasks.
Eloy Andaluz introduce all of these new features in a nice video you can review here:
Thinkinetic is glad to sponsor “withoutborders” Hum3D competition, the theme is about modeling and rendering famous buildings of your city or country.
Сreate a 3D work with a famous building from your country to help other participants to see this beautiful place.
Pulldownit Pro license is one of the valuable prizes and there are plenty of them!
those interested can check rules and prizes here:
Remember you can summit your work until June 3rd, 2020.
Andres de Mingo, author of this striking shot, kindly explains us how he did the dynamics effects using Pulldownit plugin inside 3ds Max.
I love those ancient bridges in Center Europe, with its old stones and statues plenty of history, I thought it would be dramatic seeing it being affected by a earthquake and tried to depict it in this little VFX project.
Cracking the bridge
The platform of the bridge is actually a large thin box textured with a combination of paving stones and a grass shaders, I drawed a long 3ds max spline over the box and then used Shatter it tool to generate around 1000 shards around it, I added a second set of shards but this time making shatter width smaller and changing the Shatter Seed value to get a different pattern, finally I added an Uniform Shatter pattern of around 200 fragments to get rid of too large shards appearing at both sides of the spline.
I created a PDI Fracture Body for the platform and a PDI Cracker along the spline, to speed up testing I set Local Propagation for the fractures, also to prevent fragments flying away too much I set a low value for the Cracker multiplier.
Making paving stones exploding
After I was happy with the main crack, I started adding more destruction on the bridge, for blasting group of cobbles I reshattered the platform in different areas near the spline, this time using PDI Local Shatter, 200 shards per exploding area was enough, following by creating clusters for each area, PDI Increase Selection tool is great for this, setting the cluster Hardness to 0 and adding a low break energy to get the exploding effect. Then I had just to set the break frame per cluster at the correct time to get the explosions happening one after another.
Crumbling the Statues
There are 5 statues on each bridge border, that’s makes a total of 10 models to shatter and destroy, this can be quite a lot of work, but I managed to speed up things by using some clever Pulldownit features. I started by drawing a spline over the statue surface and creating a cracker for it, then shattering the model with PDI path based style in around 300 shards, and adding an Uniform shatter pass of around 50 shards to get rid of large fragments on the model, finally I added also a couple of small PDI Local shatter shards in some borders of the statue. By creating a fracture body and setting it to static and only break I got the statue crumbling nicely without breaking it completely.
But for the statues in the background I did it much simpler, I made the model adquiring the shattering of the version in close up view, using PDI Adquire shatter style, then creating some cluster to make the statue starting crumbling at the desired frame , that’s did the trick perfectly.
Conclusions
This shot involved several models to be damaged and cracked, thanks to the easy of use and clever features of Pulldownit I was able to have all destruction effects done and adjusted in a short time. I like specially PDI Jagginess , this feature add detail to inner faces so cracks looks rough and more realistic when rendering the scene without having to create complex shader for them.
Evermotion Challenge 2020 winners announced!, congratulations to all of them.
There are specially thrilling works this year due to the pandemic and the theme of the contest,
All works that were sent to Evermotion Challenge 2020 were outstanding not only as visualizations, but also as a sign of our times
The Evermotion team
you can review best works here,
Hum3D Car render challenge 2020 winners announced!, congratulations to all of them.
As sponsor of the competition Thinkinetic is proud to award with a Pulldownit Pro license to the winners among other amazing prizes.
take a look to best images and interviews with winners in the official announcement:
Merry Christmas and best whishes from the Thinkinetic team, in this awful year
we want to thank specially to all users who have purchased or renewed their Pulldownit licenses, at Thinkinetic we continue working every day and indeed we finish 2020 with a strong set of improvements in performance and usability to Pulldownit 4.x either for 3ds Max or Maya, thats not all, we are preparing a new version of the software to be released in next months, with new features and enhancements we expect will be useful for your productions, take a look to this blog from time to time, next version of Pulldownit will be announced and featured hear.
thank you for trusting our tools in this dificult year,
stay safe and have a merry christmas and a plenty of joy New Year!
Thinkinetic is proud sponsor of this year “My own 2020” challenge by Evermotion.
“Year 2020 is a breaktrough on a global scale. The consequences of events around us will be felt for decades to come. We invite you to make an art using 3d techniques (still image or animation) that will be your personal interpretation of this year and its local, national or global consequences. It can be small, personal image or a grand scale epic visualization – you choose..“
You can summit your work until 20th December, 2020
Pulldownit Pro license is one of the valuable prizes and there are plenty of them, those interested can check rules and prizes here:
KineticThoughts 