In pair with 2.72 plug-in, NVIDIA has presented new 2.85.0427 version of PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

2.85 plug-in is roughly equivalent to MassFX 2013 in terms of features, except that it provides APEX Clothing support instead on mCloth simulation engine.

• General
  • General: Support for APEX 1.2 (however, PhysX 3 cloth is not yet functional)
  • General: Support for PhysX SDK 3.2 engine.

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NVIDIA has resleased updated PhysX plug-ins of 2.7 branch – 2.72.0421 for 3ds Max (2012 - 2009) and 2.72.0511 for Maya (2013 – 2009).

Please Note: 3ds Max 2013 is supported only by 2.85 PhysX plug-in, due to significant compatibility changes in 3ds Max SDK.

• APEX 1.1 update for LOD fixes.
• APEX Clothing now exporting collision shapes once per asset instead of once per LOD.
• APEX Clothing fix physical mesh visualization bug.
• APEX Clothing Latch To Nearest system now only support 30 instead of 32 channels.
• Fix crash when attempt to generate composite mesh on problematic geometry.
• Removed friction max clamp on rigid body.
• Fix RayFire bug – some convex fails to simulate.
• Pop-up previewer fixes for textures usage crashes.

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Following presentations were held as part of NVIDIA Game Technology Theather event on March 7.

First one is called “3ds Max with MassFX” and was presented by Chris Murray from Autodesk.

Update: recording is now available on YouTube

This talk was mostly focused on features under development, that are expected to be added in future versions of MassFX, like mCloth – new clothing simulation solution.

mCloth is supposed to provide stable two-way interaction with rigid bodies, probably utilize GPU acceleration, support user-controlled tearing (through vertex selection) and include some interesting pressure simulation for balloon-like behaviour (for example, if you have holes in your mesh, balloon will deflate).

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Basefount has announced release of Miarmy 1.2 – plug-in for Autodesk Maya that is capable of behavioral animation, crowd simulation, physics calculation and rendering.

Amond other features, physics engine in Miarmy 1.2 is now based on PhysX SDK 3.1 (in previous releases – 2.8.4), which provides faster and more accurate rigid body physics simulation even with high number of complex jointed objects.

In addition, usage of new PxCloth solver allows “100 times faster” simulation of cloth and clothing assets.

With new PhysX 3.1 Engine, The limit on the number of dynaimc agents is gone. On an average home PC, one can easily create a scene with more than 5,000 agents enable dynamics which contains more than 85,000 RBD objects and 80,000 dynamical joints. The cloth simulation will became almost real-time.

Along with APEX 1.1 release, NVIDIA has prepared new 2.71 version of PhysX plug-ins for 3ds Max (2009-2012) and Maya (2009-2012).

Update: 2.72 plug-ins available

2.71 PhysX Plug-in for 3ds Max – Release Notes:

• General: Fix a HW check issue for old driver causing crash for some users.
• General: Saving file at the end of a simulation will capture transform all objects in scene.
• General: Sprinting improvement for 3rd party plugins utilizing this plugin.
• General: Exporter locale issue. Force to keep as period instead of comma.
• General: Removed unused materials and shapes in exported XML files.
• General: Fix the crash with previewer, waving flag sample.
• General: Upgrade 3.x mode to use PhysX SDK 3.1.1
• General: Minor toolbar tweaks.
• General: Prevent some convex hull failure cases.
• General: Increase contact buffer for PhysX 3.x.
• General: Fix the bug that when in the middle baking, it restarts from time start. The reason is that Max does occasional preSave event and we prefer to rewind before saving.

• Rigid Body: Fix button based initial motion calculation.

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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.

UPDATE: 2.71 PhysX plug-in for Maya is released

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

UPDATE: 2.71 PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max is released

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.