Basefount Technology ships Miarmy 1.2 for Maya

Basefount Technology has released an update for Miarmy, its crowd-simulation system for Maya.

As promised on the original release of the software, Miarmy 1.2 integrates Nvidia’s PhysX 3.1 engine, effectively removing the upper limit on the number of actors or physics objects that can be included in a scene.

The demo video above shows 5,000 cloth objects, with a total geometry count of over 630,000 triangles, being simulated on an ordinary Core 2 Duo E6600-based workstation, at a calculation time of a second per frame.

The latest release also enables users to cache the movement of all the agents in a scene.

Perhaps more importantly to anyone not running Windows or a RenderMan-compliant renderer, Miarmy 1.2 is also available on Linux, while the new Mesh Drive feature enables users to export geometry for rendering in any render engine. The thumbnails accompanying this story show a test scene rendered in mental ray.

Miarmy Pro 1.2 is available for Maya 2011 and above. Basefount’s online store is currently out of action, but we assume that pricing remains unchanged at $750. A free Express version of the software is also available.

Edited 23 February: Basefount has just been in touch to say that the pricing of the Pro edition is being reevaluated, so the new price remains to be confirmed.

Read a full list of new features in Miarmy 1.2

Download Miarmy 1.2 Express
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