Thinkbox Software, developers of Deadline and Krakatoa, announces the release of Frost, a fast and flexible particle mesher that enables artists to convert point clouds to geometry faster than other leading tools.
Frost is being unveiled at NAB from April 11-14 in Las Vegas.
Frost is a particle mesher plug-in for Autodesk 3ds Max that can generate a single mesh from particles, vertex clouds, object positions, and point data files using various iso-surface or geometry cloning techniques. Frost takes advantage of modern multi-core hardware and can produce multi-million polygon meshes from millions of points in a matter of seconds without excessive processing memory usage.
"We're releasing Frost after many months of beta testing in which our customers have put Frost through its paces on several real-world productions," says Chris Bond, president of Thinkbox Software. "It's always exciting to see the amazing things our customers do with the tools. They have not only pushed Frost way beyond what we imagined the tool could do, but the resounding feedback from beta testers is that Frost has enabled these artists to create images that are incredibly unique and that are done amazingly fast!"
Frost integrates tightly with Krakatoa, Thinkbox Software's volumetric particle rendering and management tool kit. The combination of the two products introduces a new, effective particle postprocessing pipeline.
This new workflow increases the artist's productivity by decoupling the particle simulation from the meshing process, leading to faster iterations of both in the following ways:
· Frost and Krakatoa remove the need to handle geometry processing during the particle simulation, while speeding up the tweaking of the final mesh thanks to the history-independent nature of the Krakatoa particle data streams.
· The Krakatoa MagmaFlow editor exposes advanced controls over Frost's meshing parameters like particle size, geometry instancing, animation timing, material assignment and more.
· Frost provides a new approach to increasing the particle counts of existing simulations from thousands to millions while preserving vital data like velocities and mapping coordinates, once again speeding up the simulation process while supplying Krakatoa with the high-density clouds it handles so well.
· Frost extends the Krakatoa pipeline into the realm of traditional geometry rendering using all renderers available for 3ds Max.
During NAB, Thinkbox Software will host Frost, Krakatoa, and Deadline training sessions and demos in the Country Club Classic Suite #2987/89 in the Las Vegas Hilton, minutes from the NAB tradeshow floor.
Frost version 1.0, available now, supports the 32- and 64-bit builds of 3ds Max 9, 3ds Max 2008, 3ds Max 2009, 3ds Max 2010, and 3ds Max 2011. 3ds Max 2012 will be supported by a point update in April.