Following the release of 2.7 PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max, NVIDIA has also uploaded new 2.70.1028.1400 plug-in for Maya (2009 – 2012).

Update [22.11.2011]: Maya PhysX plug-in was updated to version 2.70.1109.2230, that includes various bugfixes and minor updates.

2.7 PhysX plug-in for Maya – Release Notes:

• General: New unified exporter
• General: Improved PhysX shelf GUI
• General: Support for PhysX 3.1
• General: Support for APEX Clothing 1.1
• General: Compatibility with other plug-ins that use PhysX directly (e.g. Thinking Particles)
• General: Scene validation

• Rigid Bodies: Copy/paste multiple physical meshes
• Rigid Body: Kinematic to Dynamic Switching
• Rigid Bodies: Ragdoll improved mass distribution

• APEX Clothing: Support for latch to nearest regions
• APEX Clothing: Support for Graphical LoD and Contact Layers
• APEX Clothing: improved custom physical mesh handling

2.7 PhysX plug-in for Maya is available at Developer Support Center. You can find it under following path:

[Online Support] -> [Downloads] -> [APEX DCC Clothing Plugins] -> [Maya 2.7.X (beta)]

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

Next major release of DCC PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max has arrived.

New 2.70.1028.1400 PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max (2009 – 2012, 32- and 64-bit) just have landed on download page at Developer Support Center.

Update: 2.7 PhysX plug-in for Maya is also available

Additionally, updated 2.61.1028.0930 PhysX plug-in was released for 3ds Max - it includes minor bug-fixes for 2.61 version.

2.7 PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max – New Features Overview:

• General: Additional PhysX SDK 3.1 solver

Plug-in now features two different simulation engines – PhysX SDK 2.8.4 and new PhysX SDK 3.1, with an option to switch between them seemlesly, without necessity to restart 3ds Max.

Providing same simulation quality as SDK 2.8.4, SDK 3.1 solver is noticeably faster, especially in specific scenes which contain composite meshes with complex concave geometry.

As a test, we’ve measured a time that is needed to simulate 200 frames of “Chainmail” scene (430+ composite rigid bodies), in a viewport. As you can see, in this case SDK 3.1 solver is ~40% faster.

Notes: #1 APEX Clothing is not yet supported by SDK 3.1 engine.

#2 Current SDK 3.1 implementation has limited contact buffer, so it is not recommended to use it with large number of objects.

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Current developer (and probably future public) builds of DCC PhysX plug-ins have interesting feature – you can switch your simulation engine and feature set between two different PhysX SDK versions – SDK 2.8 (as in all previous plug-ins) and new SDK 3.0

However, in latest 2.61 PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max you can already enable PhysX SDK 3.0 mode, as suggested by opethism and further explained by Blake:

All you need is to add npx.UsePhysXPlugin(2) line to px_globals.ms file,

located at “\3ds Max 2012\stdplugs\stdscripts\(PhysX)“.

Final code should look like this:

fn PxInitializePlugin =
(
try ( nvpx.InitializePhysX listener )
catch ( format nvpxText.TXT_GLOBALS_WARN_NO_DLM; )
– create toolbar
nvpx.UsePhysXPlugin(2)
nvpx.CreateToolbar()
)

In this mode, one particular feature will be very usefull for PhysX developers – ability to export your scene in RepX format, currently only one serialization format supported in PhysX SDK 3.

Other than that, most simulation features are seems to be working (except for Viewer tool), but stability is not quaranteed.

After multiple delays and postponements, NVIDIA has finally released updated version of PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max – 2.61.0906.0900

Update [20.09.2011]: updated PhysX plug-in 2.61.0916.1330 for 3ds Max is available (supports 3ds Max 2009-2012). This version includes bug fixes for several problems one may encounter, like crashes while using APEX Clothing functionality in 3ds Max 2012.

Update #2: 2.7 PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max released

New major 2.7 version of the PhysX plug-in is still in development, so this minor 2.6+ release is supposed to resolve compability issues with RayFire, and also add support for 3ds Max 2012. In this case, plug-in installs above default MassFX simulation tool, replacing it and providing additional features, like support for APEX Clothing (and if you’ll uninstall PhysX plug-in, MassFX will be restored).

No information yet on other fixes (since Release Notes are missing), but we were promised to recieve soon.

PhysX plug-in 2.61 for 3ds Max (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 – 32-and 64-bit versions) and 3ds Max Design (2010, 2011, 2012 – 32-and 64-bit versions) is available for download at Developer Support Center.

You can find it in following section: [Online Support] -> [Downloads] -> [APEX] -> [APEX DCC Clothing Plugins].

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

Update [20.09.2011]: In addition, new PhysX plug-in 2.61.0916.1700 for Maya was also released.

You can download 2.61 PhysX plug-in for Maya (Maya 2009 – 2012, 32-and 64-bit versions) at Developer Support Center.

Autodesk has published a recorded video of a presentation – “The Latest Advances in NVIDIA PhysX / APEX Technology” – that was performed by Daniel Horowitz, engineering manager for PhysX dev. tools in NVIDIA,  at Siggraph 2011.

Update: MassFX: what is coming in future versions of 3ds Max

This presentation is covering such topics as design principles of PhysX and MassFX plug-ins, relationship between those tools, and is also giving an overview on APEX Clothing authoring process and upcoming features.

Some interesting facts:

• APEX Destruction functionality will be added to PhysX plug-ins in the future. It was also mentioned, that it will be possible to use to use 3d party tools for fracturing (not only default solution in PhysXLab) and also tweak graphical and physical meshes separately.
• Next release – PhysX plug-in 2.7 will support PhysX SDK 2.8.4, PhysX SDK 3.1 and APEX 1.1
• APEX Softbodies module was mentioned.
• Contact Layers feature (basically, collision filtering) will be added in 2.7 plug-in for Maya, and 2.x plug-in for 3ds Max.
• Patner integration program. For example, PhysX based rigid bodies from Particle Flow plug-ins will be able to interact with MassFX rigid bodies.
• mCloth module will be based on ClothFX plug-in from Size8Software, but it will fully interact with MassFX rigid bodies, ragdolls, atachments and so on (nice solution to keep PhysX cloth and APEX focused on clothing simulation for games only).

It was promised that new 2.7 PhysX plug-ins will arrive shortly, in a few weeks, so keep an eye on our website for a full review.

NVIDIA PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max was updated to version 2.60.0413.1900

Update: PhysX plug-in 2.61 released

Release Notes:

Issues Fixed (Present in Previous Releases)

• [#5771] Corrupted Paint Channel when loading some older assets
• [#5770] Compression settings are reset to default
• [#5769] Ragdoll on CAT rig doesn’t save/load properly
• [#5667] Previewer crashes on some CAT files
• [#5761] Cannot save paint channel for some assets

Updated PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max is available for download at Developer Support Center. You can find it in following section: [Online Support] -> [Downloads] -> [APEX] -> [APEX DCC Clothing Plugins]

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

NVIDIA has updated DCC PhysX plug-in for Maya to version 2.60.0412.2200

Release Notes:

New Features

• APEX Clothing: External Preview window with APEX debug capabilities

Issue Fixed (Present in Previous Releases)

• [#5779] Crash when loading/applying clothing to some asset files

Updated PhysX plug-in for Maya is available for download at Developer Support Center. You can find it in following section: [Online Support] -> [Downloads] -> [APEX] -> [APEX DCC Clothing Plugins]

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

In addition, separate installers for Maya 2012 (x32 and x64-bit) are now also provided.

If you were following Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 development process, you’ve already may know that built-in Havok Reactor physics simulation engine was replaced with a new MassFX unified simulation, using PhysX SDK integration.

However, since only mRigids solver (rigid body and joints dynamics) is available so far, one may say that Reactor was omitted too early, since not all the functionality (cloth, joint motors, forcefields, buoyancy) is present in MassFX currently.

Generally, MassFX is based on modified NVIDIA PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max (likely latest 2.60), and thus, resembles its basic functionality and interface, but several differences can be spotted:

• Simulation in viewports runs much faster and smoother, thanks to new Nitrous graphics core. Performance Viewer tool, that can be found in PhysX plug-in 2.60, was removed.
• APEX Clothing functionality is not available.
• Dynamic ragdolls are not available.
• Minor interface changes.

Note: MassFX does not support hardware acceleration currently.

Note #2: To avoid slowdowns while working with massive amount of objects, it is recommended to disable rendering of physical meshes (MassFX Toolbar > Display > Display Physical Meshes).

Previously, Autodesk has mentioned that future releases of MassFX will support cloth, softbody and ropes simulation, deformable meshes, fluids and forcefields.

Also, according to our knowledge, users will be able to install PhysX plug-ins from NVIDIA over MassFX, to enhance it with additional functionality.

NVIDIA has uploaded last piece of APEX Framework puzzle – actual APEX SDK component. Now, it is time to take detailed overview on APEX features and structure.

So what is NVIDIA APEX ? APEX is multi-platform scalable developement framework, designed to reduce development time and costs when creating complex physics content.

APEX addresses following typical problems:

• Significant programmer involvement is required to take a relatively abstract PhysX-SDK and create a lot of meaningful content.

APEX provides a high-level interface to artists and content developers. This reduces the need for programmer time, adds automatic physics behavior to familiar objects, and leverages multiple low-level PhysX-SDK features with a single easy-to-use authoring interface.

• Game physics content typically gets designed to the game’s “min-spec” system.

APEX requires each functional module to provide one or more ways to “scale the content” when running on better-than-min-spec systems, and to do this without requiring a lot of extra work from the game developer (artist or programmer, but especially programmer).

• Game engine performance limitations.

APEX avoids many of the game engine bottlenecks by allowing the designer to identify the physics that is important to the game logic, and what can be sent directly to the renderer, bypassing the fully generic path through the game engine.

It also allows the game engine to treat an APEX asset as a single game object, even though it may actually comprise many hundreds or even thousands of low-level physics components.

Authoring tools (DCC plug-ins for 3ds Max/Maya and standalone PhysXLab app) are used create and tune physics assets (for example, destructible wall) while runtime component (APEX SDK) is responsible for deserialization, LOD, data management and interaction with game engine. Accordingly, APEX SDK must be integrated with your engine before you’ll be able to use APEX assets.

Few facts about APEX 1.0 Beta:

• APEX is not the replacement for PhysX SDK, nor the new version of it. It is a layer that sits on top of the PhysX SDK.
• APEX 1.0 public Beta includes Clothing and Destruction modules (and partially – Particles module).
• APEX is free for commercial and non-commercial use.
• All necessary documentation and tutorials are included with APEX 1.0 package.
• APEX supports PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 (with optimizations for consoles), and but only PC version is available for public currently.
• APEX is based on latest PhysX SDK 2.8.4 and does not require PhysX System Software installation.

How to download APEX: Follow this guide and register PhysX Developer account.

Go to [Online Support] -> [Download]

• [APEX] -> [APEX PhysX Lab Beta] -> NVIDIA APEX PhysX Lab-1.0.100.0 for PhysXLab (APEX Destruction authoring)
• [APEX] -> [APEX DCC Clothing Plugins] -> [Max 2.60 beta] -> NVIDIA PhysX Plug-in 3dsMax20– x– WithAPEX 2.60.– for 3ds Max PhysX plug-in (APEX Clothing authoring, don’t forget to choose proper 3ds Max version)
• [APEX] -> [APEX DCC Clothing Plugins] -> [Maya 2.6 beta] -> NVIDIA PhysX Plug-in Maya20– x– WithAPEX 2.60.– for Maya PhysX plug-in (APEX Clothing authoring, don’t forget to choose proper Maya version)
• [APEX] -> [APEX SDK Beta] -> APEXSDK-1.0.39 beta-PhysX_2.8.4.5-WIN-VC9 for APEX SDK (game engine integration)

You don't need to download PhysX SDK, or PhysX System Software, or anything else.

Now let’s see what is included in APEX 1.0 public Beta package:

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Ongoing (and prolonged) release of NVIDIA APEX framework has not only brought us PhysXLab (authoring tool for APEX Destruction and APEX Particles), but also new versions of PhysX plug-ins for Autodesk 3ds Max, 3ds Max Design and Maya (plug-ins were uploaded just several hours ago).

UPDATE: NVIDIA APEX 1.0 Beta released

Since many developers and VFX artists are waiting for this plug-ins, we decided to provide detailed overview of new features and changes in this versions. New PhysX plug-ins v. 2.60 for 3ds Max and Maya are available for download via Developer Support Center.

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max v. 2.60.0314.1641

[supports 3ds Max (2009, 2010, 2011) and 3ds Max Design (2010, 2011), 32-bit and 64-bit versions]

Update: PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max updated

2.60 version of PhysX plug-ins seems to be used as basis for new MassFX unified dynamics system, included in upcoming 3ds Max 2012, as it resembles same interface and basic feature list. However, 2.60 PhysX plug-in supports APEX Clothing, while MassFX does not.

Lets take a view on new features, in comparison to previous 2.40 version of PhysX plug-in:

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