An Alpha preview for PartIO has surfaced as a contributed project from Luma Pictures and user, redpawFX

PartIo is the open source particle initiative from Disney Animation Studios where the goal of Partio is to provide a unified interface akin to unified image libraries that makes it easier to load, save, and manipulate particle files. For more information on PartIo check the PartIo Technology page at Disney Animation here.

Initial binary release will include maya 2011 and 2012 linux plugins, quickly followed by OSX and Windows versions as soon as I get the build environments up and running.

Also, anyone interested in helping further the Partio Project by adding particle format support or other ports for other 3d packages, please contact us on the official partio google group

There are actually 3 parts to the plugin.

  1. partioExport command (not demo’d): (a drop in replacement syntax wise) for maya’s dynExport command with suppport for all of partio’s formats.
  2. partioEmitter : a standard maya emitter capable of loading cache data per frame and modifying the particle system its attached to, it basically functions as a “cache emitter” with mapping of partio attributes to maya attributes.
  3. partioVisualizer: is a fast, pure openGL locator capable of loading 10s of millions of particles for viewing in maya. Its usefulness includes loading up lidar point data clouds, and previewing caches or other point cloud data partio supports.

Luma Pictures (luma-pictures.com) has generously donated the project I’ve been working on to be included in WDAS (Walt Disney animation studio’s) Open source PartIO project. This is an alpha version preview of the plugin we’ll be publishing soon. features may change before beta release and inclusion in the github repo Please leave comments and questions here, or contact the partio github project!