What is Vortex Studio?

Owned by DEVOPS
Sept 09, 2022
3 min read

Vortex® Studio is a real-time simulation software platform that allows you to simulate realistic off highway equipments with minimal or no coding.

Vortex Studio can help you meet challenges such as these:

  • Prototyping potential solutions in a visual Editor to see what could work to fulfill a need.
  • Testing those solutions in a simulation Player to find out whether they work as intended.
  • Using these high fidelity simulated equipments to train operators.
  • Simulating heavy machinery systems for engineering demo or evaluation purposes.

Vortex Studio enables you to fulfill these objectives with:

  • Mechanical content production: Create test scenes and mechanical objects quickly and with minimal expertise.
  • Mechanical content variation: Easily customize and re-use the content that you have created with a definition based document system.
  • Mechanical verification: Make sure mechanical objects behave with the same physical specifications as their real-world counterparts.
  • Mechanical validation: Create mechanical model that drives, feels or otherwise replicates its real-world counterpart, achieving the goals of the simulation as accurately as possible.
  • Hardware Integration : Use standard USB and CAN controls inside your simulation for human interaction in the loop
  • Distributed Simulation : Launch the simulation on a distributed network of computers or multi processors to augment the number or size of the display
  • Integration with game engines like Unity Engine or Unreal Engine : Benefit from advanced graphics and rendering as well as easy scenario logic content creation.


Vortex Studio is used by CM Labs simulation products as mechanical content development and training simulation platform.

What can I simulate?

Vortex Studio can simulate the following, and more:

  • Articulated assemblies, contacts and constraints
  • Robots with precise grasping of objects
  • Tracked and wheeled vehicles
  • Construction equipment, digging and dumping soil
  • Equipment with high-fidelity cable behavior
  • Maritime vessel on dynamics ocean
  • A combination of all the above in the same scene

See Features and Capabilities Overview.

Vortex Studio Products

Vortex Studio Create

Vortex Studio Create is the desktop development environment for the simulation equipment you will create.

The license enables all the tools you need to design and validate interactive real-time simulations.

With a single, node-locked seat of the Vortex Studio Editor and Player applications, Vortex Studio Create is ideal for:

  • Small teams who develop simulations for a limited number of projects
  • Product development teams who want to develop virtual prototypes of mechatronic engineering models.

The Academic version of Studio Create provides a free watermarked version for universities who want to use Vortex Studio for research purposes.

Vortex Studio Activate

Vortex Studio Activate is designed to manage the configuration, licensing, and distribution of simulations that you create using Vortex Studio Create.

Vortex Studio Activate license includes 5 node-locked simulator instances that you can use to run simulations on multiple networked computers.

5 instances of Activate are sufficient to prototype and build simulators for users in your own organization.

You can purchase additional Activate nodes grants for resale of simulator instances.

Vortex Studio Applications

Vortex Studio products include different applications for creating and distributing simulation content.

Vortex Studio Editor

The Vortex Studio Editor is a desktop-based editing application designed for creating real-time simulations of mechanical models.

It also has features that let you configure and design a user interface for your simulators.

See Vortex Studio Editor.

Vortex Studio Player

The Vortex Studio Player is designed to load and play the simulations that you create with Vortex Studio Editor.

See Vortex Studio Player.

Vortex Studio Director

The Vortex Studio Director manages the installation, deployment and monitoring of distributed simulators across a local network.

It is the main interface from which integrators can manage simulators.

See Vortex Studio Director.

Where to Next?

For tutorials, see:

Further reading in the user guides:

If you still have any questions after reading these sections, be sure to visit the forums at https://www.cm-labs.com/vortex-studio-community/ (you may have to create a free CM Labs user account if you don't already have one).