Hey fellow Softies!
I’m just getting caught up after a week of NAB in Vegas, a little vacation to catch my breath, and then I crammed last week for the webinar and finally had time to tell you about a cool plugin from my friends at Exocortex, Momentum 2.0 SP1!! If you didn’t know, Momentum 2.0 is an awesome multiphysics simulator based on the Bullet real-time game physics library. Helge Mathee whom hopefully all of you know was responsible for the integration so you know it’s tigggght!! Having been blown away by Helge’s work for years it’s always a treat to see what he’s been working on and this doesn’t disappoint. I had a chance to run through the included tutorial scenes and was mighty impressed right from the start. Momentum relies heavily on the Softimage ICE framework so it’s wicked fast, and of course fully multi-threaded. Momentum 2.0 is as I mentioned is built on ICE but they also created an easy to use tool bar if you don’t want to get your hands that dirty. Personally I got mine quite filthy using Momentum, you should too! Check it out!

http://player.vimeo.com/video/20760525

It looks like a studio in Germany, Sehsucht.de got their hands dirty with Momentum too, watch this awesome advertisement for the new Lamborghini Aventador.  http://www.sehsucht.de/Lamborghini-aventador/ I traded a few emails with Felix Geremus from Sehsucht who gave me a few details on the spot. I tried to summarize what he wrote but it didn’t make much sense so here is exactly what Felix told me! :) ”Softimage and Momentum was used on all of the Monolith sequences. We shattered and then sub-shattered the ground with a slightly customized version of Kratos and a few custom scripts. The ground for each Monolith consists of about 15000 pieces. Actually the bottleneck was to shatter and freeze those pieces with some custom ICE attributes for each. But once we had this, the Simulation with Momentum was quite fast (I think about 15min per Monolith) and left some time to experiment with the settings.
Through ICE we could control the simulation so that larger chunks would stay together and break into smaller pieces based on impact or velocity. We simulated all the pieces as instances, and then copied their animation through ICE to a merged object for faster interaction. Finally the smaller sand particles were normal ICE particles emitted from parts of the pieces. Rendering was done via Arnold with Displacement, GI and Motion Blur turned on (yeha!)”

Helge has also made a great 20 minute video going through all the features of Momentum as well. All the demo scenes are included so you can go through them too. Momentum 2.0 supports rigid and soft bodies, cloth with volume, constraints, all sorts of stuff, even ropes… and all in combination with one another! Watch Helge show you here.
http://www.exocortex.com/documentation/momentum/tutorial_videos

So that’s it, get yourself a trial copy of Momentum and see what you think!
http://www.exocortex.com/simulation/momentum

Other than that, I’ll be hitting the road for events in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver this week and next for our Canadian reseller 3vis. Check here for dates and times:  http://www.3vis.com  Hope to see you there!

Oh, I'll do a proper blog post on this later in the week but in case you missed the webinar on ICE I just posted it to youtube in full 1080p.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do1kzR6gVYk

Mark