Tuesday, December 13th, 2022 Posted by Jim Thacker

Insydium’s NeXus coming to Blender, Maya and 3ds Max


Insydium has announced that NeXus, its new GPU-based particle simulation system for Cinema 4D, will also become available for 3ds Max, Blender and Maya in 2023.

The toolset – a GPU-accelerated successor to X-Particles, Insydium’s popular Cinema 4D multiphysics plugin – is capable of liquid and granular fluid simulation as well as more general particle effects.

At the time of its release, Insydium described NeXus – which is available separately to X-Particles, and runs on AMD, Apple and Nvidia GPUs – as “the first wave of cross-platform GPU-powered X-Particles tools”.

A GPU-agnostic tool for particle, liquid and granular fluid simulation
First released earlier this year, NeXus ports key toolsets from X-Particles, the firm’s popular particle-based multiphysics plugin for Cinema 4D, to the GPU.

The initial release 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.

NeXus also includes 14 general-purpose GPU-based particle modifiers.

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”.

Price, system requirements and release date
Insydium hasn’t announced any details about the new 3ds Max, Blender or Maya editions of NeXus yet, beyond the fact that they will be released in “2023”.

The Cinema 4D edition is compatible with Cinema 4D R19+, running on Windows 7+ and macOS 10.13+, and is available separately to X-Particles itself, as part of Insydium’s Fused product collection.

You can find details of pricing in this story.

Find more information about NeXus in the online manual (Cinema 4D edition)