Tag Archives: maya

Choosing Leaning Direction before Breaking

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This post is an extension of the “Cracking an Ancient Statue “ tutorial you can find here:

Cracking an Ancient Statue in Maya

Some users has asked if it is possible to decide the leaning direction of a model before breaking it completely with Pulldownit; the answer is yes, you can do it  and very easily.

For choosing the leaning direction you have simply to select the fracture object in PDI Basic Fractures tab,  then go to Fractures->Dynamic Properties tab and set initial velocity according to your desired leaning direction, that’s all.

If your initial velocity parameter is greyed out you have to set Basic Fractures->Activation to “at frame” or “At first hit” to enable it. Here a demo video of the effect:

Notice the bigger initial velocity, the leaning will be faster, so better to set it to small values to get a natural motion of the model.

Pulldownit for Maya 2024

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Pulldownit , the destruction plugin, is already available for Maya 2024, you can review latest features of PDI for Maya in this post:

Pulldownit 5.5 for Maya released

Maya 2024 itself brings a number of updates in animation, modeling and performance, and native support for Apple Silicon chips in Macos systems. This new version introduces a novel Graph Editor Sculpting feature, allowing to drag or smooth animation curves in brush-like style to make adjustments on the fly. In addition, animators con now display all skin weights values directly in the viewport and multiple Skin Clusters are supported. Besides the Time Slider has been redesigned for better handling of keys selection ranges and audio waves visulaization. Finally Autodesk claims of significant performance improvements, especially when playing back animation on complex rigs.

Regarding modeling, Retopology tool has got a number of updates,a new symmetry option allows to get the same exact topology at both sides of the model, and there is new options for preserving edges by angle or component tag, also user can now display both input mesh and retopologized one simultaneously, allowing to compare result and adjust areas visually and there is a new option to pre-check mesh during Retopologize to quickly identify and fix mesh issues.

An there is a new unsmooth option which lets you simplify a smoothed mesh, useful for creating low resolution versions of 3D models, although currently only works with meshes subdivided by the Catmull-Clark method.

The old good Make Live tool has got an useful improvement aswell, now It supports multiple objects, speeding up the drawing of splines or quads over existing geometry.

USD support introduces LookdevX, a new material editor for creating USD shaders inside Maya. It is independent of the classic Maya Hypershade tool therefore counts with its own editor, according to Autodesk it is intended to work seamlessly across multiple DCC tools in the pipeline.

In the simulation field Bifrost updates to version 2.7 introducing a new MPM solver able to simulate snow and high viscous matter like toothpaste, ketchup or ice-cream along with improved volume rendering in the viewport.

AntCgi review and test many of Maya 2024 new features in this nice video:

Pulldownit 5.5 for Maya released

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Pulldownit 5.5 is here and comes with useful updates, Shatter it tool has been multithreaded and highly optimized, getting up to 8x faster shattering with regards to previous release. Chipping areas of the model is also faster and you can discard shatter centers directly in the viewport just by clicking the mouse over it.

Bounded Cracks introduced in version 5.0 has been enhanced with the ability to turn them dynamic at the desired frame, allowing to create easily stress cracks that ends up tearing the surface completely at some moment.

Working in complex destruction scenes is easier and more intuitive, in cases of many objects colliding, dynamic solver has been adjusted to get nice fracture results with default parameters and when two objects impact each other you can decide which one will break in first place simply by reducing its hardness value.

Maya Cache Playback is now supported after baking simulation keys for the whole scene, this allows user to play the simulation at a fast, sustained rate and recover dynamic data afterwards to make changes if needed.

There are also useful improvements to the UI, you can modify parameters for several fractures at once and create several crackers at once or toggle display of all crackers paths with one click.

Last but not least we have fixed quite a few annoying issues from previous version, making the tool more predictable and reliable than ever.

You can review below all performance and usability improvements 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 5.5 from his account and there is a demo version for Maya 2023 in the Thinkinetic web site.

Shatter New Features        

Shatter it multithreaded along with other performance improvements that makes shatter an object in hundreds and thousands of pieces around 8x faster than in previous release.

New ability to remove shatter centers directly in the viewport, when in Shatter it draft mode simply by clicking mouse + ctrl key, the selected shatter center is deleted.

Dynamics New Features 

New ability to generate Bounded Cracks until frame , stress crack propagation can be set to last until desired frame, after that it continues as an usual dynamic crack.

Initial velocity can be set for “activation at frame” fracture bodies, linear and angular velocity can be added to static fractures bodies, setting in this way the initial motion direction when the object becomes dynamic.

More intuitive behaviour in collision between fracture bodies, user can decide which of them will break in first place simply by reducing its hardness value. Besides small fragments collisions don’t trigger fracture anymore, therefore fracture activation starts always at the exact impact moment between the two objects.

UI Enhancements           

Maya Cache Playback supported after baking PDI keys for the whole scene, deleting PDI data before using Maya Cache Playback is no longer needed, allowing to recover simulation afterwards to make changes if needed.

New option to auto clean all PDI data after baking simulation, this new option allows to use Maya Cache Playback at the fastest speed right after baking PDI keys.

New ability to set parameters for several fracture bodies at once.
New ability to edit name of selected Cracker.
New ability to show/hide all Crackers paths at once.
New ability to set parameters for several Crackers at once.
New ability to create Crackers for all selected curves at once.

                                                                                                                

                                                                       

                                                                                                     

Cracking an Ancient Statue in Maya

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In this polished tutorial, Esteban Cuesta shows us how to create long cracks over
an ancient statue and shatter it using Pulldownit plugin in Maya,

Bounded cracks is a new feature introduced in Pulldownit 5.0
allowing to create cracks over the surface of 3d models and controlling the strenght and extent of the crack easilly.

Thank you Esteban for this great tutorial!

Pulldownit for Maya 2023

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Pulldownit , the destruction plugin, is already available for Maya 2023 an brings an important enhancement, Shatter it tool is now 4 times faster. This new update v 5.3 will be available for the rest of supported Maya versions in the following weeks.

Maya 2023 itself brings quite a lot of improvements in animation, modeling, and performance.  Boolean operations have been revamped with new modes, more intuitive visualization in the viewport and a new Boolean Stack editor for easily manage your changes. Retopology tool has been boosted with a new auto remesh option allowing to get quickly good results with less preparation of the scanned model. There are more deformer options and important performance improvements when modifying hi-poly meshes, besides you can now control the transparency level of the wireframe on shaded, which is very useful working with dense meshes.   

Regarding Animation Autodesk has introduced a new Blue Pencil tool allowing to create 2D drawings and annotations directly in the Maya viewport which are saved with the scene.

There are also usability improvements to the Sweep mesh tool and Arnold render has been updated, besides Bifrost now support USD assets.

Since several years ago Autodesk is focused in strengthen Maya for animation tasks, and probably it counts with the most powerful toolset on this area, this new version includes also important enhancements for modeling, that’s good, however making Bifrost supporting USD assets isn’t the most appealing update for those working in VFX , hope Autodesk moves forward and devotes time to improve seriously Bifrost aswell.  

AntCgi review and test many of Maya 2023 new features in this nice video:

Shatter Text Effects in Maya with Pulldownit

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In this new tutorial Esteban Cuesta show us how to create appealing 3d text shatter effects in Maya using new features for destruction included in Pulldownit 5, in a few and easy to follow steps he shows how to crack letters in diferent ways or turn a 3d text dynamic to get a nice crumbling effect, worth to review it.

More news are coming in September, until then have a great holidays!

Cracking a Moai statue with Pulldownit 5

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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!

visit Ideaform3d Channel

Pulldownit 5 for Maya released

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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 for Maya 2019

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Pulldownit plugin is already available for Maya 2019,  you can download it from the users area if you have licensed the plugin or download demo version from the web site in case not. You can review latest features and demos of Pulldownit 4.5 here:

Pulldownit 4.5 for Maya new features

There was a great expectation about Maya 2019 because it was taken much longer than usual to be released, many users’ thoughts were about some big new feature was coming, but finally Autodesk has focused this release in usability of the tool and performance by presenting an impressive long list of bugs fixes and a few but important improvements when using the software in production.

The major enhancement in Maya 2019 is the new cached playback feature, by using it you can speed up the playback of complex scenes or get a sustained frame rate  directly in the viewport removing the need to playblast the scene to review  issues, in addition you can modify keys freely and the cache auto updates quickly taking in account the changes so you get indeed a faster workflow specially for animation. Cached Playback is intended to be used with keyframed characters or some types of cached animations so all the dynamics solvers inside Maya: Nucleus, MASH, XGEN etc.. doesn’t support it. The same happens with Pulldownit, you cannot activate cached playback while computing dynamics however after baking keys and delete all PDI bodies you can enable it to speed up the playback in viewport, in our tests with scenes including around 1000 fragments this new Maya cache double the viewport FPS running at near 70 FPS, and if you export the destruction to Alembic the playback is even faster reaching a speed to around 90 FPS in average. Here a quick tutorial about using  Maya 2019 cached playback with Pulldownit simulations:

 

There are other improvements regarding animation keys, two new filters has been added, Butterworth and Key Reducer, the first one is intended to clean noise in animation capture data and the second is useful to remove needless keys in the animation.

Besides the integration of Arnold Render in Maya is becoming deeper with each update, in version 2019 you can use Arnold render inside one Maya viewport or render regions directly in the viewport 2.0

Autodesk also claims complex scenes now load faster and interactions with viewport 2.0 are quicker, in our experience that’s true so far, so even if some people is disappointed for the lack of brand new features in other fields we think Autodesk has done it right making Maya faster and more reliable in this release, users should notice it in his everyday work.

Running Maya Linux in Optimus Laptops

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Autodesk Maya runs in Linux systems as a charm, fast and stable, you may have experiment it if working in some of the large studios which uses Maya Linux extensively, so let’s say you are used to Linux and decide to install Maya at home but if your computer has an NVidia Optimus GPU, and all modern laptops has this kind of card, you are going to get in troubles because NVidia hasn’t released a proper driver for Optimus GPUs in Linux and it seems they haven’t plans to release it, so what to do?

What is an Optimus GPU?

Optimus cards are actually a dual GPU, one card( INTEL) is welded in the motherboard and connect directly to the screen, this card is very limited, just able for 2D drawing and basic 3D features, not valid for using Maya,  specially it can´t support Viewport 2.0,  then there is another card( NVIDIA), a more powerful GPU which handles all the heavy 3D stuff, it is supposed this card auto activates when the system detect the application you are using needs demanding 3D features. The idea of a dual GPU is nice, because you save battery power by using only the basic card when running 2D applications or system menus and heavy 3D features are enabled by applications or games which needs it saving your battery and besides keeping the laptop temperature lower, all of this happens in Windows system but not in Linux because the lack of a proper driver by NVidia.

optmusPipeline

Making it work

There are two different strategies for making Optimus work in Linux, the simplest one is deactivating the INTEL card in BIOS so the system is forced to use the NVIDIA card always at the expense of your battery power, sadly only a few hi-end laptops allows to setup this feature in BIOS.

The other way is using a software bridge between both cards, at the beginning there was only BumbleBee, an independent software project which uses VirtualGL or Primus to communicate both GPUs,  there is a performance penalty when using these libraries and besides it doesn’t work with all applications, sadly Maya is one of them, in our tests using BunbleBee Maya launches with Viewport 2.0 but it crash by simple interactions with the keyboard, so no way.

Luckily in the middle 2016 NVidia itself fixed partially its Linux drivers to can do the switch between both cards in a fast way by using what is called NVIDIA-PRIME capabilities, this mechanism has a few limitations and needs an special configuration of your system to work which sadly it isn’t explained clearly in NVidia docs.

Installing NVIDIA-PRIME

We have been able to install NVIDIA-PRIME in an Optimus laptop with CentOS7 following this excellent guide by Ezequiel Mastrasso,

guide to install NVIDIA-PRIME in Centos 7

Some comments about our own experience with installation if this can help to someone:

In step 2 of the guide Ezequiel says a Xorg with ABI 24 is needed but according to NVidia ABI 23 is supported and actually our system is using elrepo kernel 4.19 which features Xorg ABI 23.

In step 18 of the guide our system turned black screen, but rebooting and skipping directly to step 19 did the trick, the rest of the guide worked perfectly for us.

Actually our system is a dual boot Windows 10 /Centos 7, this didn’t affect in anything the installation of NVidia-PRIME.

Finally before starting the Optimus setup we recommend to install and run nvidia-detect by elrepo, this little utility will shows up the exact NVidia driver your system needs and also check compatibility with your current Xorg server and displays its ABI number.

In our tests using this setup Maya Viewport 2.0 works perfect and Unigine benchmark seems not having any noticeable performance loss by using NVidia-PRIME .

Nevertheless, as Ezequiel mention this configuration is pretty sensitive to system changes, for example in our case NVidia-PRIME mechanism got broken just by installing the mesa-lib-GLU library, but luckily reinstalling the Nvidia driver again fixed it instantly, anyway it is a good idea to make a system backup when you manage to get it working just in case.

Hope this article helps you to enjoy Maya linux and of course Pulldownit plugin in your brand new Optimus laptop!

mayaRunningwithOptimus