vik

Progress on the new DMM Plugin for Maya 2016

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vik
, 08-08-2015 at 01:42 AM (104680 Views)
Greetings,

I thought I would keep everyone posted on progress.

We've had a number of other projects that have delayed the plugin release. Some are relevant - like making some improvements to the DMM simulator to allow it to handle larger meshes, and others are longer-term - a cloud version of DMM.

The new plugin will have material regions too. This will let you define multiple materials on a single object. It's a feature that is available in our API - in fact, you can define every tetrahedron to have a different material property. Remedy is making use of material regions extensively in "Quantum Break" using a custom version of the DMM Plugin.

Tonight we have the plugin running on Maya 2016 under OS X. There are some bugs that we are fixing, but I am confident we will have those resolved shortly and get the plugin out to you soon after that. I would love to give you an exact date, but until the bugs get fixed, it's difficult to say. I expect within the next 2 weeks we should have something out to you.

Porting the DMM plugin it to a new version of Maya is non-trivial. Autodesk doesn't maintain binary compatibility between releases and so we have to rebuild the plugin every time. Compiler changes, OS changes and Maya changes make this a nontrivial process, so it's not like you just hit "make" and everything works. There is quite a bit of effort involved to build and test.

With DMM having been used on well over 100 movies now, and many many TV shows, we want to make sure everything runs smoothly on any new version we put out.

We are also adding a new floating license system that will allow anyone to move their license between machines. Many people have asked for this and it is finally being added. Our existing license system will be phased out in favor of this new one.

I will keep you updated as we make further progress.

-Vik

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  1. vik's Avatar
    We have the current plugin working well on Maya 2016 for OS X! I ran some test scenes and it ran without issue.

    The next hurdle is to merge the changes we have made to the solver to allow handling of large meshes.

    The new licensing system is also being brought on-line. Concurrent to that we are also adding the material region changes to the UI. The material change work is done an this feature has been in use at Remedy for the past 6 months so it's well tested. You can see the results of it in their incredible scenes for "Quantum Break".

    -Vik
  2. mandark1011's Avatar
    This is fantastic news Vik, very excited to see the next version of this amazing FEM engine!!
  3. Termix's Avatar
    I look forward to those large mesh handling feature

    Thank you so much for DMM!
  4. vik's Avatar
    Continued integration on the large mesh support. We tested with some meshes our customers sent us and everything seems to work well. We've also added a higher material iteration limit and are adding some code to let you know when the solver doesn't converge within the limit of iterations for a particular material. This happens when you have a very stiff material sometimes. The solution is to increase the number of iterations and/or to reduce the stiffness and mess with toughness.

    The good thing is that the new version of the plugin has an API call to let you know when the solver is not converging as well as some code to check that. This is a very useful feature for larger mesh simulation.

    -Vik
  5. vik's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Termix
    I look forward to those large mesh handling feature

    Thank you so much for DMM!
    Glad you enjoy using it!

    -Vik
  6. Termix's Avatar
    So.. Any news on destruction field?

    Tomas.