Particle Flow, for those outside of the loop, is the quite powerful particle system within 3ds Max. It’s not quite Houdini, but it does have some remarkable tricks’including a few that were added in Max 2010. Orbaz Technologies has been developing their box set of tools for Particle Flow that truly amp up the power of PF by leaps and bounds. I would recommend that any studio using Max should also add these to their toolkit.
Most recently, Orbaz released Box#2Pro, which has tapped into NVIDIA’s PhysX simulator to create real-world natural and man-made rigid-body simulations, in near real-time’depending on how many particles you want to throw at it.
New Birth operators allow for filling a volume or placing particles close to one another without intersection for optimal use with the PhysX engine. Other new operators with ties to PhysX are gravity, drag, collision and other typical forces that have been tailored to the simulator.
They would have normally had me at hello, but I’m a skeptic. Then I saw the tearing, breaking and ripping of meshes driven by the dynamics of the particles. I witness glass breaking in different stages based on varying glue and solvent strengths and cloth ripping apart once a certain force is reached. Seriously, you really only need to watch the demo video of Box2 before you ask for a bib to catch the drool.
Website: www.orbaz.com/products/particleflow/box2
Price: $595
