Alembic has become the new standard for data exchange between different platforms and applications. After proving to be a success in productions like Iron Man 3 (2013) , Pacific Rim (2013) and The Amazing Spiderman (2012), Alembic is here to stay.

The development pipeline in a diverse production environment has never been simpler. Artists work in their preferred DCC tool, and save their scenes in Alembic, for later integration. Exocortex Crate now supports importing and exporting nearly everything you can create in Softimage, 3DS MAx and Maya.

I have some really good news for Alembic users.

In the two years since we first released Alembic suite of tools, we have learnt a lot about how Alembic performs in the real world. One thing that has come up with some of our larger clients, was that the performance of Alembic leaves a bit to be desired when dealing with very deep scene hierarchies and/or thousands of scene nodes.

What do The Avengers (2012), Titanic 3D (2012), Iron Man 3 (2013), Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), and Jurassic Park 3D (2013) have in common?

The Answer: Exocortex Fury 2. The production proven GPU-accelerated particle renderer for Maya and Softimage.

Species 1.6 is now available at Exocortex.com. This update adds great new features, improvements, and functionality for users. Check out the video for this release:

Exocortex Species simplifies the process of human character creation from designing your character’s unique attributes, integrating sculpting results, to rig creation, even animation. With Species, you will create higher quality animated characters faster and at a lower cost, while avoiding the generic look that often come when purchasing off-the-shelf models. Exocortex Species supports Autodesk Softimage 2010 through 2013 on both Windows and Linux. Floating and node locked licenses are available starting at $299.

We are pleased to present another major update to Chris Covelli and Eric Thivierge’s premium Softimage character creation tool: Exocortex Species. This is the second major update in the two months since official release that adds functionality and further optimizes user work flow.

What is Species?

I am happy to say that we (Oleg Bliznuk and Exocortex) have released the first version of ImplosiaFX, the fast and modern ICE Modelling-based shatter toolset. :-)It supports Windows both 64- and 32-bit (Linux coming soon ).It has been significally improved and extended since the first version.

Here are the key key improvements:

Chris Covelli and Eric Thivierge would like to announce the immediate availability of Exocortex Species v1.0

Check out the trailer video, its features and download a trail demo here:

Here is a quick summary of what I've learned the last few years of working with a large code base.

(1) Get the faster possible processor. I would recommend an Intel Core i7 2600K (4 core/8 with HT) or an Intel Core i7 2700K (6 core/12 with HT) as the best price/performance ratio right now. Both of these run at around 3.4Ghz (and can go even faster when only one core is used, such as the case of creating a pre-compiled header.) If your CPU isn’t near the top of this list, you are very likely spending too much time waiting for your compilations:http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

After a long beta, several projects being produced and a huge amount of features being added, Momentum 3.0 is finally available!

Version 3.0 adds support for fracturing, dynamic as well as static, quality UVs as well as normals, revamped plotting (including plotting to disk) and a big amount of workflow and performance improvements.

As we continue towards the release of Fury 2, Richard will be taking some time out to present a series of videos outlining some of the new features and changes. In this video Richard presents the basic Fury rendering options and describes a few of the changes to the UI that have been made in Fury 2.

If you are interested in joining the Fury 2 Beta please contact info@exocortex.com

The first update to Helge Mathee's well-received Bullet physics plugin for Softimage is now available as Exocortex Momentum 2.0 SP1. This release is even more scalable and stable. Also, SP1 brings with it a new geometry generation operator which we are calling the 'Momentum Instancer'. With this operator a lot of new workflows are possible, as shown in this video that Helge Mathee has created.

If you haven't yet tried out Momentum, register and download the demo at the Exocortex website: Exocortex Momentum Webpage

Here is an update to the SlipstreamVX and Fury package. This update addresses the following issues:

The download, as usual, can be found on the main SlipstreamVX product page:

For immediate wide release.

September 24, 2010. Fluid simulation specialists Exocortex Technologies, in collaboration with Thiago Costa, today announces the public release of the innovative "SlipstreamVX" smoke, air and fire simulator for Autodesk Softimage 2010 and 2011.

The release today is a minor one. This release focuses solely on improving the stability of Fury on a variety of video cards. Fixing these issues has usually involved purchasing the video card in question and then running Fury and reproducing the issue. The main video cards for which this release significantly improves stability are the following:

This release likely improves stability for other NVIDIA video cards not listed as well, but these are the specific video cards that we targeted based on the automatic error reports we received.We always recommend running with the latest video drivers.

We've put together another release of SlipstreamVX. The most notable feature of this release is Fury 1.2, and with that the OpenGL requirement has been lowered to 2.1. We also batch the rendering into smaller groups so it should no longer crash out Windows TDR with the message that the driver had to be restarted.

The new Fury also includes an experimental option for self-shadowing. Currently this feature is CPU-only, and is not a physically accurate model, but you may find it gives you more to play with in your effects toolbox.You can get the latest release from the SlipstreamVX product page.

We've been working hard to improve stability with this release, as well as a few new features for Fury. It also includes a new activation dialog that should be easier to use. For those of you already licensed, you can download the release directly here. Otherwise, I suggest getting a trial by following this link.

The main notable feature of this release is Fury 1.1, here's the latest changes:- improved stability- motion blur fixed- higher quality particle kernel- added a fixed color mode for modifying particle colors post-simulation- fill alpha fixed, and PNG writing should be much faster- enable automatic remote error reporting