NeXus 2026.1 blurs the line between Blender and Cinema 4D
Insydium has released the beta of NeXus 2026.1 — an update to its GPU particle simulation add-on for Blender and Cinema 4D. The release's key change: the Blender and Cinema 4D versions now run on the same build of Theron, the platform-independent simulation engine.
According to the developer, NeXus becomes a single system for both hosts: the same setup behaves in Cinema 4D exactly as it does in Blender — the same solvers, the same modifiers, the same result. For studios with a mixed pipeline, that means a simulation doesn't have to be rebuilt when moving from one package to the other.
One solver for different materials
The second major part of the update is nxMPM, a unified multi-material solver. In a single simulation it lets you mix liquid, elastic bodies, snow, sand, brittle materials, metal and foam.
The solver comes with built-in transitions between material types: a substance can change its properties depending on a particle's age, its velocity, stretch or accumulated damage.
To keep performance up, the solver has an automatic sleep system built in: particles at rest stop being computed until a collider or a force wakes them.
Other new tools
A set of new objects extends control over the simulation:
- nxPin holds selected particles in place — an anchor for cloth, ropes and soft bodies;
- nxDeformer makes a mesh deform along with the simulation particles while preserving UVs;
- nxBind keeps particles inside a deforming volume;
- nxBioLogic — a cellular growth system with modes for reaction-diffusion structures, differential growth and forms resembling slime moulds and corals.
Existing nodes have been updated too. The nxMesher meshing system has gained UV advection — the texture now travels with the liquid surface. The nxCollider object has learned to work with surface stickiness, supports variation across a wider range of properties and accepts surface maps of various types as input, including images and noises. Nine new falloff shapes have been added — among them torus, capsule, cone and spline — plus eleven new falloff layer types.
The release also brings a new viewport render, likewise shared by both packages: it draws smoke and fire voxels, as well as FLIP liquids, more cleanly.
Who it's for and what it costs
The NeXus 2026.1 beta is compatible with Blender 4.3 and newer on Windows, Linux and macOS, and with Cinema 4D from version 19 onwards on Windows and macOS. The engine is built on Vulkan, so it runs on AMD, Apple, Intel and NVIDIA graphics cards.
The beta is free to holders of any Insydium license. A new perpetual license costs £140 (around $185), and NeXus is also part of Fused, Insydium's add-on bundle for Cinema 4D. The full list of changes is published on the developer's website.
Why a unified engine arrives now
NeXus launched in 2022 as the GPU counterpart to X-Particles — Insydium's long-standing CPU plugin for Cinema 4D. The Blender version only appeared this year, after several years of development. Bringing both editions onto a single engine build looks like the logical conclusion of that transition: maintaining two diverging codebases is expensive, and the promise of identical results across packages only works with a shared core.
Behind it there is probably a broader trend as well: Cinema 4D plugin developers are increasingly moving to Blender, the free package has widened the potential audience for commercial add-ons, and vendors are rearchitecting their products to support multiple hosts at the core level. If the trend continues, a studio's choice of DCC package may come to depend less on which simulation tools are tied to it, and competition between plugins may shift towards solver quality and compute speed.
What will you try first in the beta?
- Moving a scene between packages
- Liquid and sand in a single solver