Zsmoke, increasing the resolution on the viz node appears to scale the transform on the fluid node, is this correct? At playback it appears to have increased the res too because it becomes slower, it just seems a little quirky to scale the transform also.
Apart from that everything else appears to be working well. BTW it is necessary to set your project otherwise the caching wont work as expected.
Cheers.
Good to know it is working on your side!
Increase grid resolution WILL enlarge size of the box, boundary of simulation, because more grids are there. CANNOT scale the box, there is a parameter named Grid Size, default is 1, use smaller grid size will correct that. 1 for 64^3, then 0.5 for 128^3. Playback to see the update.
Of course increasing grid resolution WILL slow down the simulation. More grid, more calculation, more details, more time.
Save Cache is meaningless for now, it dumps 2 files into /data folder each frame. Can only render that with new zSmoke, which is not finished yet.
hi im newbie in your plugin (experienced in CG industry though)
i tried out a bit of your software and it’s of great potential .
im however i bit lost on the workflow and relationship between zFluid and Zsmoke
does it mean we sim using Zfluid, cache the particles, then Zsmoke read in the cache and do the rendering(viewport)?
it’s definitely very fast you are great.
how is it compare to the functionality of maya fluid and fumefx in general?
another question is, in some page in your blog i always saw a pixelated fluid render in a 2D plane representing the 3D particles of zFluid,
how is it done? How and when do we use this “2D plane mode” compare to the Zsmoke 3D fluid rendering? is it a faster preview render of fluid method?
thanks for the big effort and beautiful science!
Thanks manymany for the feedback. It is a bit cool down these days.
First is about zSmoke, some volume rendering plug-in. Lots of overlapping semi-transparent textures planes. Position of those planes are controlled by particles. That is why this thread called Particle Cache.
Then zFluid. That is a different thing. A fluid 3D solver on GPU. It does have some, of course not all, functions of Maya Fluid. It updates field properties, like density and velocity, every frame. You see those particles? They are used to inject density and velocity into the field, to impulse the solver to move. In fact, grid-based fluid solver can work WITHOUT particles. Why still need particles? Well, that is quite straight forward way to visualize density field in 3D.
There is not easy to render a volume, zFluid does show a slice of flied, that is what you call “2D plane mode”, that is no 2D, but a slice in 3D. And that is for display purpose only, giving some idea about how the density looks like at that slice.
Maya Fluid does both simulation and rendering. zFluid does simulation only. That is too complex to do both on GPU. I want to separate the render function in zSmoke. It will still draw planes, not on particles but on density field saved by zFluid.
Since most of my energy is spent on 3delight stuff these days. Those who want to render zFluid cache via zSmoke should wait for a while.
Hello zsmoke, in Ztools saving & loading is working fine but when i try to render nothing is comes up…So,plz tell me wht to do.Thnx
Hi Zhang,
this is such a great tool, I would like to contribute if that would help to get x64 versions out.
Do you have some paypal donate account?
Als
Hi,
I’m trying to cache zfluid particles, but they don’t save.
Any thought on that, or any tools for rendering them directly to archives for 3Delight?
Tried bin exporter from realflow, and that works fine.
Thanks
Als
Hi,
Sorry not being around for a while. I have to do some work on 3delight. Now I am preparing a major update of zFluid. Let it be zFluid Pro, which fixed a few issues with current zFluid, and added a few more features:
[ul]
[li] Multi-Particle System: fluid field can move more than one particle systems.[/li][li]Field cache: run simulation once to save the field, velocity per cell mainly, when field is cached, 3D fluid simulation can be skipped. Simply read the result back can speed up playback greatly.[/li][li]Multipass Particle Cache: playback to save out particles. Each time will be a pass. Because field is cached, large movement, position of swirls, remains same. But individual particles varies each pass due to noise output force. If Maya can do 500K particles during a pass, save out 10 passes will accumulate to 5 million. This will replace the Maya PDC files.[/li][li]RenderMan Rendering: saved particle files will be loaded by RenderMan procedural primitive to create points for render. This will be added to Anemone ( another plug-in for 3delight shading/rendering management ) and render with 3delight.[/li][/ul]Still testing those new features. Future development will include some custom rendering tool, but it will not be available on next release. zFluid Pro will not be available for free, but I will update the public demo with basic functions.
About 64-bit build: I can build 64 bit on Windows now, will be no problem supporting multiple version of Maya on both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows.
About zSmoke: no development about the sprite-based particle rendering tool so far. Overlapping textured quads in OpenGL still lacks of detail when particles are moving fast. Need more sophisticated rendering tech!
Thanks Olivier Junquet for sharing his test animation. Basically save particles to RIB and render in PRMan with ReadArchive. Lots, lots of points with motion blur and deep shadow. This is done by old zFluid WITHOUT multipass particle cache.
I will post more tests.
Awesome stuff zsmoke, Im liking where you are going with zFluid. Look forward to more updates and a release!
Hi,
this is all great news. I’m was serious about being your first customer, please contact me!!!
Cache doesn’t work with native maya caching. But works with realflow export.
Also I’m geting the square artifact on particles when using big number of particles.
Thanks
Al
Testing with one fluid moving more-than-one particle systems. It seems working so far:
http://cid-a6597afda81373ba.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/tmp/multipsys.mov
That video is captured in real-time. You can see two particles mixing each other.
Maya native PDC doesn’t work, because the field won’t update.
What is “square artifact on particles when using big number of particles”? During simulation or rendering? Using realflow export? What renderer are you testing with? So far I only test it with RenderMan. Krakatoa users may try Maya-To-Krakatoa Exporter:
But I haven’t tested that.
How do you set that one up? Can one do it now, or this is your current version? I have to try it.
I’m using 3Delight.
The artefacts are same as when maya moves particles with fluids.
Set beyonce to zero instead of 2, and crack up number of particles, it is very obvious,
both during simulation and rendering. I’ve rendered without motion blur, just a test render,
so without caching. I tried to cache with realflow export bin, and that seems to be working.
I can not show the render, because it’s for the job I’m on at the moment.
I’ll try to set one up with different emitter to illustrate (when I grab some time)
Thanks
Als
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fPq-rE3e50
I have uploaded tutorial video about some basic zFluid operations and a 400K points test. A bit slow on my laptop, but still makes sense. It shows the latest version of the plug-in, a few improvement from the last update. And the feature of attach a field to two particle systems is not available with the current release.
Now most of the solver is done, I can focus on the rendering side.
Still have no idea what “auto-resize fluid” means:( Will find out.
Just worked out the DSO, Viz, RIBGen to render particle cache saved by zFluid in 3delight. About 1.2 million points are saved in 4 passes and aggregated and rendered with deep shadow and motion blur. Just a quite test. Will do heavier tests tomorrow.
I’m having a lot of fun with this in Maya 2010 x64, and would like to render out the particles. However the particle caching doesn’t seem to be working properly, I tried caching the zFluid then caching the particles, but the particles just appeared to move as they usually would.
Is this not supported yet or am I missing something?
