In nuce: The cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services has made its AWS Thinkbox plug-ins available under an Apache 2.0 open source licence; the plug-ins include Krakatoa (toolkit for volumetric particle rendering), XMesh (for caching geometries), Frost (for generating a single mesh from paricles) and Stoke (a tool for volumetric and particle simulation). The plug-ins are suitable for use with Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya.
In toto: According to the corresponding release note published on aws.amazon.com, the idea behind the open source move is to give users the ability to design tools according to their own needs – and to make long-term decisions. In the same release note by Bharathi Muthukrishnan (Senior Product Manager), Conrad Wiebe (Software Development Manager) and Even Spearman (Software Development Engineer), it is mentioned that VFX service provider Scanline in particular has used the now open-source plug-ins for its productions (including: Stranger Things Season 4, The Gray Man, The Adam Project or Aquaman).
Click to continue: The official announcement, including all relevant links, can be accessed via aws.amazon.com . In a similar announcement published on 3 August 2022, Digital Production referred to VFX tools that were also made freely available by Amazon Web Services.
Sources: cgpress.org (announcement by CGPress Staff), aws.amazon.com ( announcement by Bharathi’Muthukrishnan, Conrad Wiebe and Even Spearman)
