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What happened to MaelstromFX?

Posted: 05 Jun 2012, 20:02
by Hirazi Blue
Does anyone of you perhaps know, what happened to Exocortex MaelstromFX?
It was featured quite prominently on the Exocortex website, while still being under development,
but now it can only be found as part of all the other Exocortex Documentation as far as I can tell...
Is it dead or is it still being developed? Is it per chance close to a public release?
Or will it remain available only "under a development arrangement" as originally stated?
I know: those are all NDA-defying questions, but I'd really like to know as it always looked quite stunning...
(http://vimeo.com/album/270955)

From the Wayback Machine:
MaelstromFX employs unique and patent pending technology in order to solve the Navier-Stokes equations on an adaptive tetrahedral mesh. This produces very high quality 3D fluid effects for film. The application has performance and scaling advantages over traditional voxel based systems. Although the mathematics are more complex the artist has more flexibility to use different sized tets to represent regions in a scene for the right effect and visual fidelity. In general, this reduces the overall simulation mesh size and thus speed up simulation. These smaller meshes can produce very high quality fluid effects and can scale much larger than uniform voxel meshes.

The first version of MaelstromFX currently supports simulation for air flow including dense smoke, wispy smoke, fog, haze, wind, and liquids. Support for fire and explosions is expected in the future.

Re: What happened to MaelstromFX?

Posted: 05 Jun 2012, 20:51
by Mathaeus
Hirazi Blue wrote:Does anyone of you perhaps know, what happened to Exocortex MaelstromFX?
It was featured quite prominently on the Exocortex website, while still being under development,
but now it can only be found as part of all the other Exocortex Documentation as far as I can tell...
Is it dead or is it still being developed? Is it per chance close to a public release?
Or will it remain available only "under a development arrangement" as originally stated?
I know: those are all NDA-defying questions, but I'd really like to know as it always looked quite stunning...
(http://vimeo.com/album/270955)
I think I sow Ben Houston's answer on SI mail list, that they didn't found interest in VFX, but they did in games, something like this. Just tried to find it again, but no luck - by tradition of that list, could be under some not-so meaningful topic.

Re: What happened to MaelstromFX?

Posted: 05 Jun 2012, 20:54
by BenR
From this xsi_list thread
We still believe that Maelstrom's technology (surfacer + simulator)
has potential at a technological level but at the moment we don't see
an effective market opportunity in the VFX space. (We are engaged in
other fluid simulation projects though outside of the VFX space.) We
would also like to focus on fewer things to ensure that they are
completed at a high level of quality.

Best regards,
Ben Houston

Re: What happened to MaelstromFX?

Posted: 05 Jun 2012, 21:20
by Hirazi Blue
Thanks for clearing that up, you both... ;)
(must have missed that thread, probably because it started as a thread about naiad)
Too bad, really...

Re: What happened to MaelstromFX?

Posted: 06 Jun 2012, 11:06
by mattmos
yeah I thought this was a real shame, was looking forward to well integrated larger scale fluid sim.