Autodesk announced that it has entered into a license agreement with Lagoa Technologies for its Lagoa Materials multiphysics simulation technology. Built by Thiago Costa with Autodesk Softimage software's ICE (Interactive Creative Environment), the Lagoa multiphysics simulation framework helps create realistic simulations of the dynamic behavior of liquids, cloth, foam, plastic deformations and soft body collisions. Lagoa Materials multiphysics simulation technology is included in the recently announced Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites Premium and in the just released Softimage 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack.
With Lagoa, Softimage users will be able to create highly customized simulations with control properties that help govern incompressible fluids as well as inelastic, elastic and plastic deformations. Artists will be able to simulate fine detail interactions and collisions and use Lagoa simulator data to help create user-defined materials, particles and meshes. Lower resolution, interactive setups can be more quickly created from preset materials, allowing for more rapid effects previsualization of simulations requiring millions of points.
The multi-threaded Lagoa simulation framework was built using the powerful and highly flexible Softimage ICE development environment. Softimage ICE is a node-based, visual development platform for creating custom tools and stunning visual effects. ICE is designed to help reduce the complexity of creating custom effects by providing a visual development paradigm, reducing the need to write complex scripts or computer code. Users can be more creative and efficient, exploring new creative ideas with greater ease and simplicity.
"ICE affords developers greater speed and agility when it comes to creating custom effects. It is also fully multi-threaded making it unique among simulation capabilities integrated into other 3D animation applications," said Stig Gruman, Autodesk vice president Digital Entertainment. "We're tremendously proud that Thiago Costa seized the potential of ICE to design such an incredibly realistic simulation framework - one that also allows multiple physics solvers to operate at the same time in the same scene and even to interact."