Massive Version 9.3 has body page undo, improved dynamics, high contrast UI, lots of other improvements, and hundreds of bug fixes.
Brain, Tree and Action pages in Massive for Maya
Massive for Maya now has all of the pages of Massive Prime, except for the scene page (which is handled in Maya via the outliner). This means that Massive for Maya can be used for building agents from scratch and for editing every aspect of agents from within Maya, without the need to open standalone Massive Prime.
High contrast UI
By popular demand, a high contrast user interface option has been added to Massive. This is available in the Options menu. This setting is saved in the Massive preferences file.
Body page undo
Finally it's possible to undo changes made in the body page, and best of all, it works with instanced agents too.
Dynamics
There have been several significant improvements to rigid body dynamics in Massive:
Servo rotations set directly from the brain
Brain output channels that control segment rotations now affect servo targets. Previously the only way to control dynamics servos was via actions. This opens up huge possibilities for procedural dynamic animation driven directly from the brain.
More stable servos
Servos are now much more stable than before due to changes in the way that the dynamics code interfaces with ODE and Bullet. Previously servos were implemented using torques and now motor constraints are used instead, resulting in much better control.
Servo motion unaffected by rotation limits
Servos now ignore segment rotation limits. While these limits are useful to constrain agent "ragdoll" dynamics to sensible ranges of motion, they can get in the way of driving dynamics with actions. Now that servos ignore these limits, agent dynamics can more faithfully follow agent actions.
Sensible dynamics settings
Settings for rigid body dynamics have always been tricky to get right, largely due to the huge ranges of values required to get the desired results. These ranges of values were a result of units, masses, constraints and other forces acting on the agents. This has been massively simplified (pun intended) in Massive 9.3 by internal scaling according to units and masses. So now the forces required for such things as servos and rotation constraints are more consistent and more sensible, and work across agents of differing units and sizes.
Switch for motion tree path planning
Since Massive 9.0, Massive uses path planning to find the quickest route from one action to another through the agents motion tree. There may be situations in which the earlier motion tree behaviour is required, so we added a button to enable/disable motion tree path planning.
Polygon Generators on vertical terrain
Massive 9.2 included changes that allowed for Polygon Generators to be dragged onto steeply inclined or even vertical terrain. This seems to work well in most cases, but in scenes that have wildly undulating terrain, the Polygon Generator can sometimes spin unexpectedly. So we have added a button in the place editor to switch off the new dragging functionality if required. This state is set on a per-Generator basis and is saved in the mas file.
Arnold 7.5
Massive now supports Arnold 7.5.1.0
RenderMan 27.2
Massive now supports Pixar's RenderMan 27.2
V-Ray 6
Massive now supports V-Ray 6.
Massive 9
To find out about the features released in Massive 9.2 click here
To find out about the features released in Massive 9.1 click here
To find out about the features released in Massive 9.0 click here