Martian Labs, a two-year-old company that develops software for the 3D animation industry, has introduced Martian Hydrous Tools, a suite of ocean surface simulation programs for film and television production environments. Martian Hydrous Tools integrates with Side Effects Software's procedural animation package Houdini to enable artists to create photorealistic ocean surfaces and object/fluid interactions from within Houdini.
Special features of Martian Hydrous Tools include an open architecture, so that users can customize the software according to their needs, automatic creation of whitecaps, and methods for creating wakes and splashes caused by objects (such as boats) in the water.
Martian Hydrous Tools runs on Linux, Windows NT, 2K, and Irix platforms. The price is $2000.
Martian Labs also makes Martian Glue, a conversion plug-in that allows Houdini users to quickly import scene description data from other software packages into Houdini. —JD
Martian Labs; www.martian-labs.com