Friday, November 6th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Basefount Technology releases Miarmy 4.2

Basefount Technology has released Miarmy 4.2, the latest version of its crowd animation system for Maya, boosting viewport performance and simulation speed.

Faster agent placement, render export and viewport display
Version 4.2 is very much a performance release, so most of the changes are under-the-hood improvements.

The most significant is the updated OpenGL display, which results in a “7-8x performance improvement in the viewport display”, enabling users to work with tens of thousands of agenents without latency.

More data is now cached rather than being generated on the fly, resulting in a 6x speed increase in placement of agents, and a 5x increase in speed when exporting render data to Arnold or V-Ray.

Simulation logic gets a smaller speed boost.

In addition, there are a number of smaller workflow and feature improvements, which you can read about via the link below, including changes to the transition map and UI for individual crowd agents’ stats.

Pricing and availability
Miarmy 4 is available now for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. A node-locked licence costs $2,650 if you buy outright, or $1,950 to rent for three months; and there is also a free Express edition.

Read a full list of features in Miarmy 4.2 on Basefount Technology’s website