FumeFX

#4881

LOL because you woke up earlier than I did :smiley:

#4882

Maybe a silly question but does fumefx 3 now work with vray dome lights in combination with vray hdris?

#4883

Is there a demo version of Fume 3.0 to try out?

#4884

Wow, did my question single handedly kill this thread? Heh. I thought you guys would be posting some sweet FumeFX 3 tests. :slight_smile:

#4885

fR dome light works with Fume, don’t know about vrays, there is not a demo version yet, I am stuck blowing smoke in 2.1 for the next couple of weeks.

#4886

Nice… :twisted:

#4887

fR dome light works with Fume, don’t know about vrays, there is not a demo version yet, I am stuck blowing smoke in 2.1 for the next couple of weeks.

great news, it will be cool if it’s work with vraydomelight :cool:

#4888

Didn’t fr dome lights already work fumefx 2.1?

#4889

Not directly related to the 3.0, but what is your highest resolution (in terms of pixels) you have taken a FumeFX-effect-rendering (and still looked good)?

I’m asking this since I’m really struggling to create high resolution stills of Fire.
For a simple fire-effect my grid is 900x1000x750 (“spacing of 0.2”, and “Sim up to 42487MB”), with an added WT of 1,5 (grid size 1350x1500x1125). And I still see that the grid spacing is not fine enough (partial rectangular voxel shapes). The only way to mask it, is to up the Rendering jittering, but that blurs out the entire effect
Note that I render this at 4500x4500 pixels and it is a still (no animation, so no way I can get away with “motion blur” :wink: ).
Am I aiming too high? Is this not possible with FumeFX?
BTW I sim on an Intel i7 2,93GHZ (8 virtual cores) with 16GB of memory on Windows 7 64-bit.

Just would like to hear your experience with high resolution renders of FumeFX-effects…
Any suggestions are welcome and much appreciated.

Thank you.
David

#4890

I would guess to say that it is very shot specific. Still frames generally do look better with a very high resolution, simply for the fact that the individual can sit an stare at it for an unlimited amount of time. Hard to pick out minor blems at 24 fps unless you are frame cycling.

You can use the AFC curve to help reduce the noticeable voxels, this will only get so far but it can help, much like using the jitter value. You can treat it in post too, it is not that you only go so far as to look at the render but what can be done with the render, it is simply the first step, right?

#4891

Johnny thanks for the reply.
Indeed with animation you can “mask” some errors. A still and especially one at high res doesn’t allow you to do that :sad:

AFC-tweaking solves a few issues, but a large part remains visible and is a real problem. Post is involved but not on that scale (I would have to rework approx 75% of the image).
I’m trying to get a little more detail into the sim by pushing my system. We’ll see how it turns out. But to be honest, I’m not very optimistic. I’m afraid that this is not what FumeFX was intended for.

Another (slightly related) question: What type of system do you guys sim on? Is it comparable to mine ( Intel i7 2,93GHZ (8 virtual cores) with 16GB of memory on Windows 7 64-bit)or do you have some other recommendations (except more RAM and more CPU :wink: ).

David

#4892

Looking at how cheap RAM is right now, go for 32 GB. I plan to up from 16 to 32 myself in 1-2 weeks. And with 32 GB, you can really go nuts with fumefx.

I have the same type of system as you, I7 + 16 GB.

#4893

@Raycat:

I don’t think that 4.5k is totally out of the realm of what fume can produce, but, you are pushing the boundary a little. In saying that it might take some love on the comp side to help achieve what you’re after…

I’d say that it would be benificial to have more ram, but if you go from 16gb to 32gb, but you’ll almost quadruple the sim time depending on your settings… and then you get into a whole other level of dealing with fume, ie how the sim changes the higher density of voxels you go. Test render times etc… Depends on how much time you have to RnD that…

Also have you considered splitting the it up into multiple grides that overlap? Splitting it up vertically across the frame and make 4 or 5 containers may help get more voxel detail in.

But back to my first comment, I’d say comp is your answer …
If its a still id guess you would have some time to polish the image in something like nuke/AE/Photshop. Not sure what you’re comping in, but maybe have a look at idistort nodes in NUKE, or displace in after effects, or think the glass filter in photshop (i think its called that) this will help round out the jaggy voxels, pushed too far its looks like glass and make it a bit shit, but it can chill it out. Some post work like grading, and light glows might also help cover the voxel up a little.

Other then that, the rest does come down to RAM and AFC curve.

Hope that helps :slight_smile:

Cheers Kieran

#4894

@ FlorinMocanu: Indeed, it seems a good time for upgrading my RAM. Have to look into it.

@ kieran: First of all thanks for the extensive reply.
I’ll be looking into upgrading my RAM (I’m not entirely sure if I can upgrade it in my current machine, so maybe a new “FumeFX”-machine is on the horizon). So I hope to overcome some voxel issues and get more detail in it.
The reason why I’m a bit hesitant to extensive post is that I’m currently in an RnD-phase and the final production requires the creation a lot (+30) of high-res (even going up to 6.5 K) stills (of different sims) to be created, so extensive post work will lead to enormous production times. Adding glow and minor glitches will be solved in Photoshop. But I would like to avoid solving fundamental issues (not enough detail) in post production. Instead the render output should be good enough.
Also the final stills should be really sharp, and masking voxel problems often ends in some kind of “blurring”.

Just that I’m understanding this correctly: with the AFC you mean the one for Opacity in the Rendering-tab, right?

Oh one other thing, I noticed that the 3.0 preview-window generates different results when choosing CPU or GPU. Does anybody know of a videocard that supports good previews? Does it depend on hardware-support for a certain type of directX shaders/version or CUDA, or…?

Thank you all for the help/information, guys! I really appreciate it!

#4895

We are in the middle of production with a couple of weeks to deadline, and looked forward to some features in fume3 to save us a lot of headache, but we need some info before we update our licenses to fume3.
My question is simply: is it possible to open up fume2 files in fume3? or do we have to redo the fume2 files in from scratch.

The features we want is the improved mr renderings (i read something about it on the afterworks site), since we need illumination from the fume and dont possess any other fancy renderers.

The other feature is the “fume recognizes its own movement” if the container itself is animated.

Have anyone tried these things out?

Thanks!

#4896

You’d be surprised what people can and do with fume :slight_smile: I always am.

IMHO your machine is “capable” but definitely on the lower end of a sim box, on the other end of the scale, dell dropped of a demo box the other day that I only had the priviledge of scoping the specs on, processor wise I was drooling dual 8 core xeons at 3.1ghz for a total of 32 physical and virtual cores! Boooyaah ram was a little slim at only 32gb, a quadro 5k, and a barely sufficient raid 0 ssd array, 3 256gb somewhere drives I was told, didn’t catch the capacity for myself.

That said, I would consider 24gb of ram minimum, a few single tb drives, if single processor 6 cores minimum, duals well more is better only when the core speed is high, more lower ghz cores perform worse than fewer higher ghz cores.

Most of us tested the GPU preview with various mid to high end Quadros and upper GTX cards 480, 560, and 580’s. A higher end card either pro or gamer will give your better performance.

Tollman, I only tested a few 2.1c scenes with 3.0 beta4 and they opened without issue. I have been working away from home for the final beta/rc stage of testing and didn’t have the chane to check against the final. As with anything max, fume or not older scenes/setups can always be hit and miss.

#4897

Johnny, thanks for the feedback. I’m currently investigating the possibilities for a new machine. Because like you said my current PC isn’t really up to the task that lies before me.
I’m taking your recommendations into consideration, and my budget :sad:

Thanks again!
David

#4898

I said it was “capable” :slight_smile: at the very least drop in as much ram as will fit, that will help, you will just have to wait longer for it to sim. but you will go farther.

#4899

I had good experience with prefab gaming rigs from newegg :slight_smile: costs $1,100, outruns the little older workstation that once cost $4,000

#4900

Hello guys, I have a problem with my Fumefx render (same problem with scanline and v-ray)

When a use a gamma 2.2 I have a little bit more smoke and details than 1. But, when I save my render in .exr or .png (format with alpha) you can see that I lost a lot of smoke. And when I save in .jpg without alpha I have more smoke but is not good for compositing.

Do you have an idea to help me ? Thank you a lot in advance.

I work on this personnal project : http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=7281060#post7281060

Exemple test :

Scene test file max 2012 : www.adrienrollet.com/files/gamma_fumefx.max