tyFlow

tyFlow is a procedural particle and simulation plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max, built by Tyson Ibele and distributed as a Windows plugin from tyflow.com. It carries a full simulation suite covering PhysX rigid bodies, cloth, particle binding, OpenVDB operations and crowd work through tyActors, alongside 25 or more modifiers, helpers, controllers and texture maps that make it a general procedural layer inside a 3ds Max pipeline rather than a single purpose effects tool.

Version 2.100, released 28 August 2026, added gaussian splat interchange in both directions. The Birth Flow operator and the tyMesher object import objects with a gaussian splat interface, and the tyFlow and tyCache objects return gaussian splat data when queried for it. Both paths are gated to 3ds Max 2027 and above, which is the same line in which Autodesk made gaussian splats an editable native object type in 3ds Max 2027.2, importing PLY, SPZ and LCC into a polymorphic Points object. A September 2 2026 patched build of v2.100 followed with tyVehicle fixes and no further splat changes.

The practical shape of that support is a simulation loop. A splat scan imported through Birth Flow becomes a particle source, so a captured environment can seed a simulation directly, and tyMesher can build geometry against it. The return path runs the other way, letting a tyFlow or tyCache result hand splat data back to a host that queries for it. Rendering the result is a separate step, handled in 3ds Max by Arnold, which gained splat rendering and relighting through a dedicated gaussian splat shader in Arnold 7.5.2.

tyFlow runs on 3ds Max 2020 and above and is not supported in any other host application, with Maya and Blender named explicitly as unsupported. Its GPU story is per solver rather than global. The PhysX Solver's CUDA acceleration and the CUDA Cloth Collision Solver both need an NVIDIA GPU supporting CUDA 11.2 or higher, the OpenCL accelerated Particle Bind Solver runs on any GPU supporting OpenCL 1.2 or above, and each falls back to CPU when no compatible GPU is present. Core simulation runs on any CPU configuration and scales with core count.

Licensing splits three ways. tyFlow FREE is free and carries the full simulation suite and modifier set, but withholds multi threading, general GPU acceleration, Inferno export and tyCache export, with tyDiffusion, Inferno GPU acceleration and the tyCache modifier carved out as exceptions available to free users. tyFlow PRO is a permanent licence at $495 USD node locked or $645 USD floating, each including one year of maintenance, and tyFlow RENDER exists for multi threaded network rendering without a full PRO seat. Because tyCache export sits behind PRO, the splat return path from tyCache objects is a paid feature while splat import through Birth Flow and tyMesher is not.