Fumefx in the future?

#1

What do you guys think Fumefx will be like in the future? I think that this is only the beginning of creating realistic fluid dynamics, it will keep on getting more realistic and amazing. Can’t wait for the next release.

#2

Too bad we haven’t heard anything about future Fume developments, and I’d say it’s about time :slight_smile: I would love to have a cool grid/cache manager and inter-grid communication most of all, something that will allow you to work with dozens of grids, to create cool sims. Implementing wavelet turbulence (research published in siggraph 2008), view-based refinement (ILM published awesome research in siggraph 2009) and leveraging some GPU power would rock. And, improving the shader so it can become more controlable, probably putting some noise afterburn-style in it (that’s a far-off speculation) would also be nice. Hope for the best :buttrock:

#3

Just a thoguht on this, they implemented this upresing technique in Houdini 10, but the wavelet noise version tends not to give the nicest look. Using curl noise instead often gives more natural results. There is also an interesting paper released at Siggraph this year that offers an alternative approach that doesn’t look quite so obviously upresed, I don’t have the time to find the link right now though.

#4

Here it is:

Directable, high-resolution simulation of fire on the GPU, by Christopher Horvath and Willi Geiger from Industrial Light + Magic

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1531326.1531347

ABSTRACT

The simulation of believable, photorealistic fire is difficult because fire is highly detailed, fast-moving, and turbulent. Traditional gridbased simulation models require large grids and long simulation times to capture even the coarsest levels of detail. In this paper, we propose a novel combination of coarse particle grid simulation with very fine, view-oriented refinement simulations performed on a GPU. We also propose a simple, GPU-based volume rendering scheme. The resulting images of fire produced by the proposed techniques are extremely detailed and can be integrated seamlessly into film-resolution images.

Our refinement technique takes advantage of perceptive limitations and likely viewing behavior to split the refinement stage into separable, parallel tasks. Multiple independent GPUs are employed to rapidly refine final simulations for rendering, allowing for rapid artist turnaround time and very high resolutions.

Directability is achieved by allowing virtually any user-defined particle behavior as an input to the initial coarse simulation. The physical criteria enforced by the coarse stage are minimal and could be easily implemented using any of the wide variety of commercially available fluid simulation tools. The GPU techniques utilized by our refinement stage are simple and widely available on even consumer-grade GPUs, lowering the overall implementation cost of the proposed system.

Wink towards Sitni Sati…

#5

Looking at a list of Siggraph papers I couldn’t see the one I was talking about, hmmm I guess I will have to look around to find it, but it wasn’t by ILM there were two big studios involved in it from what I remember though.

#6

I Like the idea in Houdini how you can split grids up and divide a sim over a network. Also some more control over the shader. multiple colours, colour gradients and ‘age’ based colours. Also mixing grids, so intergrading multiple fume sims would be cool. And yeah, some wavelet turbulence. Some general tweeks like, multiple objects in object sources or something.

#7

Krakatoa 1.5 :slight_smile:

http://www.franticfilms.com/software/support/krakatoa/particle_channels_editor.php

They had a great shot on their Siggraph demo reel showing some real cool smoke shading, not sure they have it posted anywhere yet, I couldn’t find it on their site. Maybe it will show up in a few days :slight_smile:

#8

Yeah especially the shaders, I cannot wait until the next version.

#9

I wonder if we could get somebody from Sitni Sati, hopefully Kresimir himself, shed a little light on things :slight_smile: Somebody know him?

#10

I know this is a small one, but in max 2010 you can use proboolean’s new “attach” function to effectively create one object out of many… we used a modifier (not publicly avail) very similar to this functionality on 2012 for a lot of things. We actually attached entire cars (comprised of a few meshes) and were able to point cache them as a single mesh this way so lighting /rendering didn’t have so many meshes in their scenes, though I haven’t tried with the new probooleans yet.

Steps to make this work --> create sphere at 0,0,0 then add a delete mesh modifier (basically an empty mesh), and then go to probooleans -> attach(radio button) -> start picking objects. They will be attached to the original “object”, respecting transforms / deformations of each other attached object. This is doable in Thinking particles via object->particle -> groups as objects as well. I think the difference is though, that fume will pick up this object simply as deforming, where the tp groups as objects is picked up as a changing topology mesh (even if the vert count doesn’t actually change), so it should be a little better for fume.

Edit: Oh yeah – all those other things will be nice. :smiley: I’m diggin’ Houdini’s fluids stuff I haven’t done much yet. I can see a few things that could be better, but overall it’s really a great set of tools (c’mon… it’s Houdini!)

#11

I wish future versions will have better optimizations in RAM usage. Using fluid mapping with high resolution container is a killer for ram. I wouldn’t care for longer sim times with an option to flush the used RAM at some stages of the simulation.

#12

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