1.1About TenPix Cloth

TenPix Cloth is a GPU cloth simulation system for Autodesk 3ds Max. It works as a set of modifiers: you add them to a mesh the way you would add Bend or Skin, play the timeline, and the cloth is simulated on your NVIDIA graphics card.

It is built for garment and fabric work in production: dressing characters, draping props, flags, curtains and layered outfits, anywhere cloth has to collide properly, stack in layers, hold its seams, tear when it must and react to the scene around it.

Features

• GPU solver. The whole solve runs on the graphics card, so dense garments stay interactive.
• True-geometry collision. The default collision system uses the collider's actual triangles, so cloth rests on the shape you modelled. Every collider has its own thickness, friction and grip.
• Self collision and layers. Folds do not pass through themselves, and the garments of an outfit collide with each other; layer ordering decides which garment gives way.
• Fabric materials. Tnpix Material Standard offers twelve stock fabrics and the everyday dials; Tnpix Material Advanced exposes the full fabric model. Both save and load your own presets.
• Painted channels. Named weight maps say where a material, a pin, a seam, a tear or a rigid piece applies, so one garment can carry several fabrics.
• Pins, seams and tearing. Pin cloth to animated objects, stitch garments together or to themselves, and tear along painted regions, by stretch or by pressure — including a freehand tear brush.
• Preserve. Tnpix Preserve makes a painted region follow the character's own animation — a Skin, a Skin Wrap, any deformer below the Solver — instead of simulating it, with a soft edge into the simulated cloth.
• Threads. Tnpix Threads grows warp and weft threads out of every tear, some still spanning the crack, and a fringe along painted hems. Each thread hangs, swings, collides and snaps on its own, and renders as a tube.
• Volume, pressure and rigid pieces. Closed shells keep or change their volume and can float, and a painted region of a body keeps its own; buttons, buckles and plates can be solid pieces inside the cloth.
• Soft bodies (experimental). Tnpix Soft Body turns a closed object into soft flesh, such as fat, jelly or rubber, in the same simulation as the cloth, with entry-level muscle simulation: fibres along a line that contract when activated, tendons at both ends and a tension point that moves the bulge.
• Scene forces. Standard 3ds Max space warps, such as Wind, drive the cloth with their own dials and animation.
• The TenPix Graph. One window shows every Solver group of the scene and edits it there: every setting of every TenPix modifier, the modifiers each object carries and the objects a Solver group holds. Add any TenPix modifier from a right-click, drag a modifier to reorder a stack, and take any step back with 3ds Max's own undo.
• Caching and finishing. Record the simulation to a TenPix cache or to Alembic, retime and posterize it, smooth it with Delta Mush, render it with motion blur, and drive a high-resolution mesh from the simulated one with Tnpix Wrap, which also closes the cuts of a torn shell.
• Render farms. Ready-made Deadline scripts record the caches on the farm, one task per Solver group, with each recorded frame shown as the task's progress.
• Repeatable results. The same scene with the same settings produces the same simulation every time, so what you approve is what renders.
• Scripting. Every panel can be driven from MAXScript; see the TenPix Cloth MAXScript Guide.

About this manual

This manual describes TenPix Cloth version 1.0544 for 3ds Max 2024, 2025, 2026 and 2027. The four builds are compiled from one source and behave the same in every version.

• Chapter 2 explains how the modifiers work together. Read it before you build your first outfit.
• Chapter 3 is the reference for every modifier and every control on its panel.
• Chapter 4 describes the TenPix toolbar and its tools.
• Chapter 5 gives step-by-step procedures for common tasks.
• Chapter 6 lists known limits and what to do when a result looks wrong.

Conventions. Control names are printed as they appear on the panel, for example Reset Simulation. A value shown as Default 4 is the value of a newly added modifier. Menu paths are written with ▸, for example Modify panel ▸ Modifier List ▸ Tnpix Solver. Lengths are in the scene's system units unless stated otherwise (see Units and scale in Chapter 2).