Mankua have updated their great free plugins Stress, ViewTools and PowerStamper for use in Max 2011 (32-bit and 64-bit).

This is exactly the same as the motion.dlc that ships with Max, except that it adds another 16 MIDI tracks to the controller.

You'll need to rename the file called 'motion.dlc' in the Max stdplugs folder to 'motion.dlc.old' and then copy the file you need from the zip file into the stdplugs folder.

Changes for v1.6.0.43178 are:
- Increased performance of particle loading, lighting, matting and rendering
- New Shadow Generation Workflow introducing OpenEXR-based Deep Opacity Maps
- Render Elements Support using the 3ds Max workflows
- MagmaFlow improvements including new Surface Operators for geometry data lookup
- New FumeFX direct rendering workflow via a dedicated PRT FumeFX object and FumeFX 2.0 support
- Improved UI startup performance
- Optimized user interface navigation
- MAXScript reading access to particle data
- Major bug-fixes
- Workflow improvements across the board

Krakatoa is available for Max 8 to 2011 and costs $995 plus support. A demo version is available here.

Changes for v1.01 are:
- Reloading a saved .max file with a point cloud now refreshes/loads the source cloud data
- Render LOD -> Custom LOD now works
- Render with Additive Volume no longer results in mental ray warnings and errors
- When Use Display Volumes is unchecked, point clouds no longer render with assigned volumes
- After multiple Display Volumes are deleted, point clouds no longer render
- Render Color -> Use Display Color now works
- All properties have been made non-animatable except LOD
- Color Leaves have been removed from the UI
- The PTS to PTSB Converter Utility has been removed from the UI

The Project Helix Technology Preview will be made available only for a limited time, so download Project Helix soon.

Changes for v2.4 are:
- Adds support for Max 2010 and 2011 (32-bit and 64-bit)

This is my monthly news entry to let people know that I am always available for 3D work (I don't just run this site, and I don't earn any money from it).

My main areas of work are commercials, industrial and technical animation, as well as programming and scripting. All of the relevant information can be found on my other site Animation Design, along with some videos of my work to give you an idea of what I can do. So if I can help out at all, just let me know.

If you are a developer of freeware plugins and are hosting your plugins on a site with restricted download traffic, then maybe I can help out.

I can offer a subdomain (eg: yourname.maxplugins.de) here with space to host your plugins and HTML stuff for free. There will also be a link to the hosted pages in the menu on the left. Interested? Just drop me a line at the email address at the top of the page.

You can also contact me if you have got source code for plugins that you don't develop anymore. I would be glad to recompile as many old plugins as possible. Just mail me to let me know what sort of stuff you've got.

Dave

The news from previous months can be accessed by clicking on the 'Plugin news archive' link in the menu.