Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 5, 2012. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
So far, Fury 2 is available only for Windows, but support for Mac OSX and Linux is intended to follow soon. The Fury renderer’s architecture is said to be suitable for rendering millions of particles, making full use of the power of modern GPUs to deliver exceptionally fast render times. Through parallel GPU use, particles with motion blur, depth of field emission or diffuse effects are said to render 20 times faster with Fury 2 than with alternatives. Some renders with millions of particles are thus said to finish in under ten seconds, which is intended to give artists greater flexibility in finding the perfect look.
To illuminate large clouds of particles arbitrarily, Fury is intended to use an advanced Voxel Light System, with settings allowing fine-tuning of shadow darkness and render quality. Another Fury feature is particle replication, which is intended to make it possible to multiply small clouds so that the impression of a large particle mass is created. According to Exocortex, Fury has already been used on blockbusters such as "Titanic 3D" and "The Avengers".
System requirements for Fury 2 include a GPU that supports OpenGL 3.2. The renderer is said to have achieved good results in particular with Nvidia GeForce GTX 2xx, 4xx, 5xx and 6xx.
A trial version is available on the website http://exocortex.com/plugins/fury2. SlipstreamVX users can upgrade for 299 dollars; for new customers, Fury 2 is available as a floating licence for Maya and Softimage for 399 dollars until mid-October. Further pricing packages can be found on the website.
