The newest version of RayFire will support an interesting “Stick to Mouse” feature that will make it much simpler to distribute and destroy fragments. The new demo video shows interactively spreading a fractured object across a street, and then interactively flinging pieces against objects watching them shatter realistically.
Over on YouTube, you can see some great videos of the new RayFire. In particular, they have some fantastic examples of the new Dynamic feature in action.
It’s amazing to see Physics Simulations moving out of the arena of SuperComputers into the realm of mere mortals with tools like GPU accelerators and fast physics engines like PhysX and Havok going mainstream. ForCG.com has a great compilation of 20 impressive physics simulation videos, including the amazing one shown above.
Physics simulations are becoming more and more advanced and more spectacular each year. With processors that are becoming faster and faster computers are able to calculate complicated simulations ending up with really stunning effects. This collection consist of some beautiful physics simulations made using RayFire plug-in for 3D application or NVIDIA PhysX. Both of them enable designers to create very realistic 3D simulations.
In an interview with Physxinfo.com, Mir Vadim talks about his amazing RayFire shatter and destruction simulation tool for 3dsMax and how it has grown from a simple idea into quite possibly the most powerful destructive simulation tool in the industry.
One and a half of the year has passed since that moment and now RayFire Tool became a default plugin for artists who need to create dynamic simulation, demolition, explosions or just prebreak objects. A lot of famous companies purchased it and use now in their production: first one and it will be here always is Blur Studio, among others are Blizzard, Disney, Fox, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Codemasters, Crytek, Rocksteady, Sega, Boeing and even US Military.
Towards the end he also discusses future directions of RayFire, and admirably denies adding in features that he considers “outside” of the focus of RayFire in favor of keeping it small, lean, and fast.
via PhysX From Inside Out: RayFire Tool | PhysXInfo.com – PhysX Articles.
Lots of drama and news in the world of NVidia’s PhysX GPU-Accelerated physics simulation toolkit. It all started earlier this month with an interview with AMD on game development and DirectX11 support where AMD has, of course, taken the lead since NVidia has no DirectX11 hardware available (yet). The comment was something like this:
The other thing is that all these CPU cores we have are underutilised and I’m going to take another pop at Nvidia here. When they bought Ageia, they had a fairly respectable multicore implementation of PhysX. If you look at it now it basically runs predominantly on one, or at most, two cores. That’s pretty shabby! I wonder why Nvidia has done that? I wonder why Nvidia has failed to do all their QA on stuff they don’t care about – making it run efficiently on CPU cores – because the company doesn’t care about the consumer experience it just cares about selling you more graphics cards by coding it so the GPU appears faster than the CPU.
Basically they accuse NVidia of crippling PhysX, reducing it to a single CPU core so that it ‘appears’ faster when run in combination with a GPU. NVidia was quick to refute the claims in a response by Nadeem Mohammad, PhysX director of product management.
I have been a member of the PhysX team, first with AEGIA, and then with Nvidia, and I can honestly say that since the merger with Nvidia there have been no changes to the SDK code which purposely reduces the software performance of PhysX or its use of CPU multi-cores.
Our PhysX SDK API is designed such that thread control is done explicitly by the application developer, not by the SDK functions themselves. One of the best examples is 3DMarkVantage which can use 12 threads while running in software-only PhysX. This can easily be tested by anyone with a multi-core CPU system and a PhysX-capable GeForce GPU. This level of multi-core support and programming methodology has not changed since day one. And to anticipate another ridiculous claim, it would be nonsense to say we “tuned” PhysX multi-core support for this case.
So they basically say that thread management is left up to the developer, so whatever situation AMD witnessed was not NVidia’s fault but rather the fault of the programmer that developed it. (Probably hoping it was an internal AMD engineer). Of course, the bulk of this entire argument is that AMD wants to break NVidia’s grip on GPU physics simulation so that their own Bullet product will have an easier path to market.
Sadly tho, Bullet is still unreleased and under development. This means that developers will have to stick with what’s available, and in a new announcement from the developers of RayFire, the popular 3dsMax shatter & physics simulation tool, that means PhysX.
Hey everyone.
Well, what can I say, RayFire Tool 1.49 Beta with 64 bit PhysX support is ready to use.
Due to some new PhysX plugin restrictions some old features are not available atm, that is why it is 1.49 Beta. For now there is no Glueing and Imposible to use Grouped objects. But the most needed features like dynamic simulation and Interactive demolition work fine.
Can’t wait to see what it does when it’s fully released.
NVidia’s Response, refuting the claims via exPreview and TomsHardware
RayFire v1.44 is now available. RayFire is a fantastic physics simulation tool for breaking, exploding, and shattering objects within 3D Studio Max. It support NVidia PhysX and several special effects for muzzle and impact flashes.
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