Tony Ambles has been working on a new particle GPU solver plugin for Maya that can push plenty of particles using OpenCL. Here, Tony provides a look at what he is calling Ionic for Maya which is a SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) and DEM (Discrete element method) Solver for Maya that runs on the GPU.
In this video you can see a very simple demo of how Ionic works in Maya, just to give you an idea of speed and UI
Some of the test videos show that Ionic can create some pretty impressive simulations with some nice movement in the liquid including foam simulations as well. Ionic looks as if it is pretty comfortable with some pretty high particle counts in excess of up to 32 million in one of the videos. Tony is planning for a demo release for the end of October 2012. For more information and progress on the development of Ionic for Maya, check out Tony’s page here – Updates are not that frequent, but progress is significant.
