Deep Rising FX and Deep FX Studio discontinued

Deep FX World – aka developer Mambo Banda – has stopped development of its software, LightWave fluid simulation plugin Deep Rising FX and standalone multiphysics software Deep FX Studio.

Sales of the software have also ceased, although the product website will remain available in the near term.

End of a five-year run of product development
First released in 2017, Deep Rising FX was a SPH-based fluid simulator for LightWave.

Separate solvers simulated granular fluids and viscous materials, and the plugin could export either meshed simulations or particle caches in RealFlow’s .bin and Houdini’s .bgeo file formats.

The software had a small but devoted user base, and reached version 3.0 in 2020.

It was followed by Deep FX Studio, a standalone multiphysics simulation tool that added rigid- and soft-body capabilities. It made it out of beta last year, but according to Banda, sales never took off.

Development ceased due to the economic downturn and mothballing of LightWave
In a blog post on the product website, Banda attributes the decision to stop development to the current economic climate and the mothballing of LightWave itself.

“This venture started with Lightwave 3D, and that seems to have been discontinued until further notice,” he wrote.

Although sales of new licences have now ceased, the trial version of Deep FX Studio remains available to download, and the product website will remain functional “until an unspecified date”.

Banda writes that he is considering open-sourcing “small parts” of the code, but that “unfortunately, I cannot open source the whole thing because it is connected to my personal code base that I use daily”.

Read the announcement that Deep FX Studio and Deep Rising FX have been discontinued