Thursday, September 22nd, 2022 Posted by Jim Thacker

Insydium releases NeXus

NeXus, Insydium’s GPU-accelerated particle simulation system for Cinema 4D, shown running on a high-end Windows desktop with a 16-core Core Intel i9-12900KS CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU.


Originally posted on 17 September 2022, and updated with details of the commercial release.

Insydium has unveiled NeXus, its new GPU-accelerated particle simulation system for Cinema 4D.

An evolution of the functionality of X-Particles, the firm’s particle-based multiphysics plugin, NeXus is described as “the first wave of cross-platform GPU-powered X-Particles tools”

It is available as part of Insydium’s Fused product collection.

X-Particles: a versatile particle-based simulation tool for motion graphics and VFX work
First released a decade ago, X-Particles has become an essential part of many Cinema 4D artists’ tookits, for creating complex effects for motion graphics and visual effects work.

Beginning as a pure particle effects plugin, its feature set has steadily broadened to encompass a range of particle-based simulations, and now includes smoke, fire, liquid, granular fluid, cloth and dynamics toolsets.



NeXus: a new wave of GPU-accelerated particle tools for Cinema 4D
With NeXus, Insydium has begun to move those tools to the GPU, with the firm describing it as “the first wave of cross-platform GPU-powered X-Particles tools”.

The new toolset, available separately from X-Particles itself, includes three GPU-based solvers, nxFluids, nxFoam and nxConstraints – not surprisingly, for liquids, foam and simulation constraints.

nxFluids includes both PBD (Position Based Dynamics) and SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) solvers, the latter capable of granular fluid as well as liquid simulations.

The main benefit over their CPU-based equivalents in X-Particles is “massive speed improvements”.

Insydium doesn’t put a figure on the speed boost, but in the teaser video, simulations are visibly faster when running on the GPU, with users able to interact with at least simple systems in the viewport in real time.

NeXus also includes 14 general-purpose GPU-based particle modifiers, listed in the online manual.

As well as speed improvements over their CPU-based “cousins” in X-Particles, some include new functionality, with the turbulence modifier getting new controls for Persistence and Lacunarity.

The toolset, which uses the Vulkan API, works with a range of GPU hardware on both Windows and macOS: Insydium told us that it works with “compatible Nvidia, AMD and Apple M1 and M1 Ultra graphics cards”.

">



Updated 22 September: Now available as part of Insydium’s Fused product bundle
NeXus is now shipping, as part of Insydium’s Summer 2022 update to its Fused product collection.

Since we last wrote about X-Particles, Insydium has changed the way that its software is licensed, ditching individual product licences in favour of Fused, an all-in-one bundle of Cinema 4D plugins and resources.

In addition to X-Particles and NeXus, Fused includes procedural modelling toolset MeshTools, terrain generator TerraformFX, plant generator Taiao, and renderer Cycles 4D.

Aside from X-Particles itself, all of the plugins – including NeXus – are rental-only, and can only be used while you have an active subscription or maintenance plan for Fused.

Users with old perpetual licences of X-Particles that are still in maintenance automatically receive NeXus; anyone with an X-Particles licence not still in maintenance will need to buy maintenance to access it.

Pricing and system requirements
NeXus is available as part of the Summer 2022 update to Insydium’s Fused product collection. The Fused plugins are compatible with Cinema 4D R19+, running on Windows 7+ and macOS 10.13+.

As of the latest update, Fused costs £500 ($715), which gives you a perpetual licence of X-Particles, plus 90-day trials of the other plugins and library assets, including NeXus.

Maintenance, which provides 12 months of updates to all of the plugins and library assets, costs £250 ($357.50). Subscriptions to all of the products cost £348/year ($497.64/year). Prices exclude tax.


Find more information about NeXus in the online video manual

Read a full list of new features in Fused on Insydium’s website