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.