New smoke simulation added to 2.5 SVN

[Nevroptere]

Mmmmh... I think these posts are more illustrative... ;)

http://www.wxtools.com/wp/archives/313
http://www.wxtools.com/wp/archives/317
http://www.wxtools.com/wp/archives/324
http://www.wxtools.com/wp/archives/327

And all in the 3D view, yummy! :D

[Fuzatron]

:eek: I think i picked a good time to finally get into Blender. Finding more cool stuff all the time!

[Nevroptere]

http://d7z.de/tmp/index.php?file=smoke5.avi

http://d7z.de/tmp/index.php?file=smoke4.ogv

[Fuzatron]

Very impressive!! There are some dust effects i am going to need to do in the near future. Hope i can use this :)

[bugzilla]

Wow. That's all playing in the editor?!?!?! This is amazing. It puts the most expensive Max plugins to shame.

[PolecatIV]

It's unbelievable... it plays in the vieport at that speed!?
:applause:

[rock]

I hope Blender keeps Autodesk honest.

[imashination]

Can the OP confirm that thats playing in realtime in the viewport? ie. not prebaked, pre calculated?

[toontje]

Well, Daniel Genrich (the smoke developer) bought a way crazy computer with donated money from the community. I can imagine him getting those high frame rates, because in average, others stated they get 1 fps (which is still quite fast) with their own computers.

[dAfTiE]

Can the OP confirm that thats playing in realtime in the viewport? ie. not prebaked, pre calculated?
Pretty sure it is, as he stated in the comments on his blog that the cache feature is not yet implemented.
Like toontje says though, he's got some silly hardware he's running it on.
And you need an openmp build to get multithreading to work.

I'm running on garbage hardware, so I'm obviously not getting anywhere near the same level of performance, but it seems just as responsive or more responsive as other smoke simulation solutions I've tried.

[imashination]

Well, Daniel Genrich (the smoke developer) bought a way crazy computer with donated money from the community. I can imagine him getting those high frame rates, because in average, others stated they get 1 fps (which is still quite fast) with their own computers.

If someone is getting 1fps on a reasonable modern cheap computer (2.6ghz, 4 core for example) Then theres nothing which is going to be the 30x faster needed to get such a frame rate. A supremely high end 16-32 core workstation with cpu daughterboards would only be around 3-5 times faster.

[Nevroptere]

http://www.wxtools.com/wp/archives/277

That's his station

But if you look under the last videos published, you can see "made by nudelZ"

[PolecatIV]

I tried the SVN 22149 with the smoke1.blend from his blog. I can only get 1fps, for now there's no cachable system for the smoke.

My config:
Pentium i7 920
6 gb ram
nVidia GeForce GTX 285 1gb

Anyway the Daniels effort is larger than life!
Holy smoke! :thumbsup:

[dAfTiE]

I tried the SVN 22149 with the smoke1.blend from his blog. I can only get 1fps, for now there's no cachable system for the smoke.

My config:
Pentium i7 920
6 gb ram
nVidia GeForce GTX 285 1gb

Anyway the Daniels effort is larger than life!
Holy smoke! :thumbsup:

That's the same build I've been testing.
Not sure it's built with openMP so it utilizes all cores or not though.

Just tested real quick, and it looks like 22149 is only using core 1 on my AMD 4800+ when calculating smoke.

[fktt]

That's the same build I've been testing.
Not sure it's built with openMP so it utilizes all cores or not though.

I have only noticed 1 64bit Linux build that mentioned openMP in its name,
so I'm willing to bet that the build you tried quite possibly was not compiled with openMP.

for an example iirc. if you want to compile something with openMP for windows,
visual studio is the only way to go, many don't have a license for that. :)

but official builds are compiled with the support so hopefully final will be much better. :)

[dAfTiE]

Yeah, I'm not too fussed about it, it's not like I'll be doing anything serious with the alpha builds anyway.
And I'm sure there'll be other speed optimizations along the way as well.

Also, isn't there OpenCL support in the works?

[fktt]

Also, isn't there OpenCL support in the works?

planned - yes.

in works - no.

the devs have agreed to support openCL as the cross platform standard that it is,
but development would only really start once the standard is out,
together with usable drivers for developers to actually use, at least the way I've got it. :)

[blaize]

Simulating these videos takes quite some time, fast systems can get about 1FPS others will take a few secs per frame.
but who knows that GPU computing brings in the future ;)

[Nevroptere]

http://www.wxtools.com/wp/archives/345

It can give clues in term of quality/performance

[toontje]

Not only that, the next post was about a speedgain of 400%

[dAfTiE]

Not only that, the next post was about a speedgain of 400%
Don't know the percentage, but the smoke1.blend posted on the blog sure goes a hell of a lot quicker in 22273 than it did in 22149.

[imashination]

http://www.wxtools.com/wp/archives/277

"way crazy computer" ? Its just a normal everyday workstation/gaming machine. So the videos shown are pre-calculated then.

[blaize]

i just tested it for the first time on my work computer:

win XP 64bit
quad core Q9950 @ 2,83GMZ
8 GB of ram.

it works really fast! realtime even!!
And i'm sure more speed improvements are going to be done (although not 400% ones :P)

so no.. videos are not pre-calculated i think. with my computer i'm getting the same results without precalculating.

[PolecatIV]

Me too! Just tried smoke1.blend file with the build 22292, now I can get around 6fps with my i7 920 and GeForce 285 1gb and that's seems not the low res settings but some kinda render quality... speechless... I'm not an FX addict but I don't remember any other program that do something like this, am I wrong?

Now I'll try to find the quality settings and drop them down a bit.

[Nevroptere]

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/167174/Smoke_Collection.mov

Cool tests from Testscreenings in the dedicated smoke thread in BA

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=158317&page=10

"way crazy computer" ? Its just a normal everyday workstation/gaming machine. So the videos shown are pre-calculated then.

Nothing precalculated, nothing like a cache yet, real time.

[Bao2]

Wow. That's all playing in the editor?!?!?! This is amazing. It puts the most expensive Max plugins to shame.

In some months there will no absolutely any reason to continue using max. The list of things that are going to come to blender are impressive. It has many things that max lacks and I was tired for years of waiting for (fluids, compositor, sculpt, painting on the mesh...).

I am still learning blender but enjoying it every second I dedicate. Each time there are less things that I miss from max.

[Bao2]

Me too! Just tried smoke1.blend file with the build 22292, now I can get around 6fps with my i7 920 and GeForce 285 1gb and that's seems not the low res settings but some kinda render quality... speechless... I'm not an FX addict but I don't remember any other program that do something like this, am I wrong?


Just now there are around 5 people entering the blender forum versus 66 in maya forum and around 55 in max forum here in cgtalk. You will see the new number of people entering this forum when 2.5 comes out with smoke and the new UI and etc...

[brkn]

"way crazy computer" ? Its just a normal everyday workstation/gaming machine. So the videos shown are pre-calculated then.

They're not pre-calculated, caching hasn't been implemented yet so what you see in all of those videos is being calculated on the fly.

edit: whoops, beaten by Nevroptere

[Magiciandude]

A lot of the high res smoke simulations are not in real-time. Blender has a screen cast feature that will take a picture every time the frame changes(I think this is how it works? Not actually sure how often it takes a picture). This is done by hitting Alt+F3 and then hitting play.

However, if the simulation is relatively low res it will run in real-time. I can get a resolution around 40 without lag on my machine, which is pretty awesome. Also, as many have mentioned, a cache feature has yet to be implemented. :)

This is very exciting :D

-Chris

[Nevroptere]

Great tutorial from Allan Brito to make a basic smoke system

http://www.allanbrito.com/2009/08/10/tutorial-blender-3d-2-50-usando-o-smoke-para-simular-fumaca-em-3d/


http://www.blender3darchitect.com/2009/08/how-to-use-the-new-smoke-feature-of-blender-3d-2-50/

[Magiciandude]

In regards to that tutorial, you will get much, MUCH better results if you set the normal value to around .1 or lower.

This is because the smoke acts and behaves on its own. It just needs a base of particles to emit it in the first place. Having a high normal value will give you very poor results.

[testscreenings]

very cool new demovideo by magiciandude utilizing the opengl output for compositing:

http://www.wxtools.com/wp/archives/375

Nice!

[GQ1]

Seeing how great the smoke is will there be any fire builds in the near future?

[Nevroptere]

You can already make nice fire effects with or without particles in Blender

http://www.vimeo.com/4820748
http://www.vimeo.com/4768920
http://www.vimeo.com/5125203

(Vimeo: blender + fire)

[GQ1]

these look very good but I was looking for something like this with driven dynamics behind it.

physbam (http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw)

[fktt]

I don't know of anything specific being currently developed for fire,
except for the smoke off course but I'm pretty sure one of the ideas was/is to use fire in Durian,
so I would think so, yes. :)

[Bao2]

I am thinking that fire is just a coloured smoke with a transition from blue to yellow to red and then to black and transparent/extinction. And drive by a wind blowing this smoke upwards. So perhaps smoke as is is already able to make fire.

Perhaps just no one smoke but two or three overlapped smokes.

[Katachi]

I am thinking that fire is just a coloured smoke with a transition from blue to yellow to red and then to black and transparent/extinction. And drive by a wind blowing this smoke upwards. So perhaps smoke as is is already able to make fire.

Nope it is not. :) The combustion process is simply an important phase that needs to be modelled (either accurately or not as accurate, but not modeling it at all is....bad).

[blaize]

the developer of the smoke simulator plans to incorporate fire also yes. it'll use the same system as smoke so they will work nicely together.
Smoke will still need a little work (like good caching) and hopefully he'll be able to work on fire then.

[GQ1]

Thanks blaize,

The smoke builds are very impressive and I can’t wait to see what he will cook up for the fire builds when he gets to it.

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