Exocortex Momentum 3: Fracturing and Much More...

[NewsMaker]

Forum: CG News
Posted By: bhouston
Post Time: 09-19-2011 at 05:52 PM
Text:



Exocortex Technologies, in collaboration with Helge Mathee, is pleased to announce that Exocortex Momentum 3, the latest iteration of the ultimate high speed multiphysics simulator, is now immediately available for Autodesk Softimage 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Building upon the broad feature set of Momentum 2, Momentum 3 adds massive new features in the area of fracturing, simulation control, quality rendering and workflow. Existing individual Momentum 2 customers can upgrade to Momentum 3 for $149 per seat until October 19, 2011. New single user licenses are available for the $499. A free demo version of Momentum 3 is available for download from the the Exocortex Momentum 3.0 product page.

Vimeo Video: Momentum 3 Trailer

Flexible Fracturing

Exocortex Momentum 3 introduces fracturing to its already extensive multiphysics engine. The fracture engine, developed from the ground up by Helge Mathee, is designed around providing Softimage artists and TD's with full control over where and when objects will fracture. Thus, the fracturing engine supports dynamic collision-based fracturing, static user-specified pre-fracturing, real-time shatter filtering as well as self-shattering. The process of fracturing as well as its results is both controlled and queryable via ICE nodes, thus providing a familiar and powerful interface for the deep customizations often demanded during production.

Simulation Control

Momentum 3 provides four new means of controlling your simulations, providing Momentum 3 users even better control over their multiphysics solutions. All of these features come out of user feedback.

ICE Controls for all Simulation Elements. It is now possible to provide ICE-based per element live control via ICE trees over all Momentum 3 simulations elements, thus letting artists most easily realize their creative potential.

"Force Sculpting." Developed by Fabricio Chamon, force sculpting is an easy and intuitive way to direct explosions through ICE. The key concept is that forces can be sculpted via the specification of a deformed mesh whose dimensions represents the various forces in each direction. One can simply modify the mesh’s deformation the area you want to change the explosion’s forces in that direction.

"Copy Motion." The copy motion modifier allows for one to copy the motion of one object, usually an explicitly animated object, onto portions of a simulated object. This allows artists and TDs to quickly and easily drive portions of a simulation when needed.

Time Warping. It is now possible to rapidly editing the playback timeline for a plotting simulation simplifying the creation of slow motion “Bullet Time”-like effects, or even allowing for time to run backwards.



Quality UVs, Normals and Motion Blur

Having great fracture simulations is nothing if it is a pain to render them. Momentum 3 has been designed so that its simulation results, even the fracturing results with changing topologies, are easily rendered. This is achieved first via robust support for flexible UV generation on newly created interior faces during fracturing. Secondly, Momentum 3 provides quality user normals that accurately capture the original object's surface, while crisply transitioning to the interior face normals. Lastly, Momentum 3 provides 3D and 2D motion blur even in situations of changing topology.

Revamped Plotting

One of the most oft-used features of Momentum 2 was its ability to plot out simulation results for later use. Momentum 3's plotting engine has been completely revamped to be more robust and to support plotting to file. Having the ability to plot to files means that even if you have complex changing topology or tens of thousands of objects, you will only be limited by the disk space you have on your servers. Plotting to files also is very useful in large VFX studios where simulation is done in a separately separate division from rendering.

And there is a lot more... but I don't want a huge post, so check out the rest of the improvements on the product page...

Overview of New Features

Here is an in-depth overview of the new features of Momentum 3 by Helge Mathee:

Vimeo Video: Momentum 3 New Feature Walkthru

To get more details, visit the Exocortex Momentum 3.0 product page.

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