AlphaVFX releases BulletFX for 3ds Max
US developer AlphaVFX has released BulletFX, a new “highly customised and optimised” GPU-accelerated implementation of the open-source Bullet physics library for 3ds Max.
Bullet physics in 3ds Max
In recent years, Bullet has become an increasingly popular physics system for developers of 3D software, and is now integrated natively into tools including Maya, Houdini, Modo, LightWave and Blender.
3ds Max doesn’t have its own native implementation, although it is available in third-party tools like Mir Vadim’s RayFire and cebas’s thinkingParticles, and via work-in-progress open-source plugin Bullet4Max.
Not too much detailed information on the features, but check out the demo videos
The information on AlphaVFX’s website is pretty bare-bones, but demo videos show off a glue system and a stickiness solver, along with a MaxScript API for customising the toolset.
You can also see an interesting-looking geodesic constraint system from 03:50 onwards in the video above, and CGPress reports that the plugin supports forces and constraints, and has an aerodynamic velocity solver.
As for performance, this demo video shows BulletFX at work on a scene with 2,000 boxes: reasonably complex, if not super-challenging by production standards.
At the minute, only Bullet’s rigid bodies are supported, although according to AlphaVFX’s comments on Vimeo, soft bodies are planned, along with separate granular and finite element solvers.
Pricing and availability
BulletFX is available now for 3ds Max 2013 and above, price $260.