Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Basefount Technology ships Miarmy 1.5 for Maya

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

The software provides fuzzy logic-driven AI and PhysX-based physics simulation features, and integrates with 3delight, mental ray and V-Ray renderers. Other RenderMan-compliant renderers are supported via RIB export.

Basefount’s customer page contains growing list of VFX houses, mainly based in South East Asia, but also the well-known US facilities Luma Pictures and Gradient Effects.

Faster batch rendering
The main new feature in Miarmy 1.5 is an update to the Mesh Drive system introduced in version 1.2.

Mesh Drive 2.0 enables users to send a Maya file directly to the renderfarm for batch rendering via a “procedural primitive method” that removes the need to calculate a geometry cache.

There is also a long list of smaller updates to the export, rendering, animation and AI systems.

Miarmy 1.5 Professional is available now for Windows and Linux, priced at $950 for a node-locked licence. A free Express edition of the software, which limits renders to 100 crowd agents, is also available.

Basefount is expected to ship Miarmy Commander, an expanded edition of the software featuring “dedicated battle control”, in September.

Updated 15 August: Basefount has just released a new demo video showing Miarmy 1.5 in action. It gives a much better flavour of what the software can do, so we’ve linked it above.

Read a full list of features in Miarmy 1.5

Download Miarmy 1.5 Express