FumeFX

#121

Just curious what you mean by frustrum culling in this case - if it’s at simulation time then how could that work? Since areas of the sim are reliant on their neighbour cells it’d be quite difficult to cut out bits - especially in cases where the camera panned off and panned back on to certain cells you’d be a tad screwed? I’d defintely welcome anything in this area though since it’d really help with long grids or sims with big camera moves.

#122

hey

recently i was shown a fluid simultr that uses a new technic to segment the grid into parts, so that u could sim over multiple machines(this was however an early dev using only a 2d sim grid), but maybe this is similer to the approach of just simulating what the camera is showing?

j

#123

grury: Check the thread here around where PixelMagic posts. I believe he did the same thing you were trying to do.

Seems to me like the best way to deal without having frustrum-based exclusion method for simulation would just be the tried and true method of building your scenes such that only what should be seen is seen. One example of this is a nuclear explosion I’ve been working on where the shockwave of dust flies into the camera. Rather than create an entire expanding ring, I opted to just use a slice of the ring that would be seen by the camera, noone is ever the wiser and i’m excluding about 75% of the entire ring, therefore saving a ton of simtime.

But, of course, having a way to sim what the camera would see would also be awesome.

I have a question to pose. I’ve been having some trouble getting a flaming ship to sim without running out of memory. Problem is, getting it to look high-quality and have the curliness I want runs me out of memory. But even expanding the spacing of the scene by .1 or .2 to adjust for that results in a drastically reduced quality. Some other settings of importance to include, not sure if they help, i’m running with either 2 or 3 steps per frame since the ship’s flying quickly; quality varies between 1 and 3 when i vary between a spacing of .5 and .7 that ranges the Size of the Simulation Area from 438x1167x168 to 313x834x120 respectively.

Basically getting the same effect as that Atmosphere Re-entry test on the youtube video would be ideal; fire-wise.

#124

Cheers Cryptite. I read through the thread, but have had no luck making my setup to work.

SoLiTuDe’s www.innersolitude.com/teapotfume.mov , its exacly what I’m looking for, gonna drop him a line and hopefully get this figured out.

Cheers!

#125

Just in case no one had tried this route but I emailed the guys in croatia and they seemed quite happy to supply me a demo though not for 64 bit 32 so i guess give it a try.

#126

We just bought FumeFX at the company i work for, in hopes to create huge jets of smoke like you would see from a shuttle or rocket launch. I’m pretty much the one assigned with delivering that effect so I’m busting my butt to learn 3d studio max and fumefx. I’ve done some of the tutorials with pretty good results. (meaning they did what they were supposed too) Had a little trouble on the explosion one. The guy in the audio doesn’t explain a single setting, he just reads them off his paper… Vorticity to uh… 1 This setting from 2 to .5… So I’m not learning much as to what each setting is doing.

I may figure this out sometime, but i was wondering if anyone could help me figure out how to get the smoke to push out from the simple helper object. Right now i have smoke that just expands out from it, but i need to give it velocity in a direction at the smokes birth place but it then looses that speed over time making a big billowing cloud.

Second question. To make this jet of smoke do i need fuel? I dont have any fire and i don’t need it. Just big white puffy billowing smoke about 300 ft high, although even at a smaller scale would be ok as long as it looked believable.

Thanks for any help! I’ll keep working on tuts and trying my best.

Benjamin

#127

Yeah that vid tut. sucks bad – especially when trying to make an explosion for the first time. :slight_smile:

Under the simple source’s velocity area there is “directional” velocity – this makes it shoot smoke in the direction of the arrow… crank that up a ways and see how it looks. You can disable fuel for the kind of smoke you want, but you will probably want temerature… experiment and find out. Also set the smoke to add instead of set… add litterally adds more smoke to the voxels instead of just setting the density in each voxel. Hopefully you have a 64bit machine with a lot of ram – doing a sim like this may hurt to get the detail you need… i guess it depends on how far away you’ll be viewing it from.

#128

:slight_smile: My web host is no more – so the link will be broken now for anybody else looking for it. The solution was a simple one – make sure you export the velocity channel or pflow won’t know where to go. I’ll be finding a new webhost whenever I get some free time – I want to put together a new site sometime this year.

#129

any body had a crack at making a flame thrower in fume using particle flow?

if so any tips???

#130

Flamethrowers really aren’t too hard… there’s a very decent thread about it on cgfluids.com I’d say check it out there first since it’s already a few pages worth of data.

#131

Hello, Im a fumefx fan and i have been fasanated for a while now, And my friend gave me a demo of it, Were or how he got it still get me, Because i’ve looked on there site and they dont offer it.
I install fume fx, and nothing, there’s nothing there in max, all the files are in the plugins and all that, everything is were it should be, im running max 9, on vista… i have to run the service pack 2, just to get max on vista. other wise known as booster pack. Could vista be the reason i cant use fumefx? I f anyone has a fix for this that would be great :slight_smile:

#132

We have made progress on our exhaust/steam cloud and could use a little help still. This pattern appeared in the renders and we are having a lot of trouble getting rid of it. By trying this setting and that; we have managed to get ourselves further from the goal while never being able to actually get rid of the pattern. Here are some settings:
HERE IS THE IMAGE
Spaceing:7
Width: 980
Length:1500
Height:650
Adaptive: on
Sensitivity: .1

Quality 9
Max Iterations 100
Simulation steps 1
Advection Stride .75
Time Scale 1

Nurbulent Noise–
Scale:1.5 Detail:1
Frames:1

Dissipation Min Dens. 0
Dissipation Strength 0
Diffustion 1

Temperature–
Dissipation Min Temp: .1
Dissipation Strength 5.79
Difusion 0

Attached should be an example of the problem.
Also we are wondering if anyone can point us to a reference that explains the each of the most important settings do?
Mostly the top few in Simulation.

Thanks for your help! Really we are getting super close, just this pattern needs to be fixed. Well for stills… Haven’t checked the animation that rendered last night.

Benjamin Schweighart

#133

Go to afterworks.com and email their support about this… they’re usually more than willing to give out demos and such, and that way they won’t question where you got it from or anything like that when you have problems with it.

#134

4dartist: When you want to increase the quality of a simulation, dropping the scale is often a better way of doing it, rather than increasing the Quality of the simulation. The bulbous pattern you’re talking about (If that’s what you’re talking about) happens when there’s extensive expansion that the simulation can’t really sim a lot of detail in. Usually the best way to counter that is to drop the scale. That will however, result in higher sim times. Try putting the quality around 5 or 6, and drop the scale from 7 to 6. Also, the Fume FX Documentation (Additional Help in the max help menu) describes all those settings. They don’t all make sense sometimes, though…

#135

The bulbous look is ok, it is a little too much in that image, but the problem is what looks like a Moiré pattern.

#136

That’s the voxels in the grid being filled with smoke – you’ll prob have to play with the opacity to get the edges to look right. --specifically the opacity curve

#137

Well, I did mean the moire pattern within the bulbous bits; just worded it poorly.

In response to Solitudes suggestion, 4dartist, if you haven’t already, turn on fluid mapping (bottom of sim panel) and add a noise map to the smoke map (rendering panel). Also turn on fluid mapping on the smoke map. I’d word that better but I don’t have my normal cpu on me and can’t think of the exact names of the settings.

#138

…good suggestions there – I totally forgot about the fluid mapping… :thumbsup:

#139

Anyone have any ideas how to remove all instances of drag on a Fume Simulation? The effect I’m going for is an exploding ship in space, thus receiving no wind friction etc. The only solution I can think of is to link the whole fume grid to the ship and solve the sim as a static bit and just let the linked area follow the ship normally. I’ve tried a few things but seem to still be getting some wind drag etc.

#140

I purchased Fume from turbosquid but they are taking a long time to getback to me.All of the Source Helpers are showing up with a blank Modify panel, nocontrols or sliders are visable. Their channels are visable in track viewthough.I’ve tested it in the following versions:Win XP with Max 8, Max 9 32bit.Win Vista with Max 9 32 and 64 bit.All of them have the same issue.None of the sample files work either. They do not render and also haveblank modify panelsSystem is a Dell 670, Dual Xeon Dual Core 2.8, 2GB Ram, quadro FX 4500Here are some screen shots of the issue.
www.vacantplanet.com/forum/Fume_Errors/FFX_Object_Src.jpg
www.vacantplanet.com/forum/Fume_Errors/FumeFX.jpgI tried re-installing Service Pack 2 and Fume FX, and re-authorizing and no luck.