Fume FX on Maya !!!

#81

Hi Redpaw,

  1. can you render fumefx at the same time as maya fluids?
  2. How does mental ray behave when the two insersect? Maya fluids deal with that with the fluid pivot center and volume samples, but how does that happen with both or in fume fx alone (the “overlay” ordering or rules of thumb)
  3. How is the speed of fume fx in maya vs maya fluids (viewport performance, rendering times in mr).

I never tried fumefx but I have worked often with maya fluids if you could answer these questions I’d be very happy. Thanks!

#82

check the latest video

http://www.afterworks.com/FumeFX_Maya/anims/areaLights.wmv

this looks awesome :slight_smile:

#83

i’ve got some awesome looking shit going at work… I just can’t fucking render anything! I’m using mental ray… I’ve added lights and connected them, blah blah…

I get this warning when I go to render with MR.


// Warning: (Mayatomr.Custom) : fumeFXShape1: connection to light shape areaLightShape1 detected, linking first instance areaLight1 instead

But my renders are just black, no alpha… nothing. Has anyone had a chance to play with it yet? How the hell do you get MR to render the damn thing.

#84

Appears that there is a bug with the current release that if you’re working in Meters you cannot render. Ugh.

#85

we could make a thread in wich we can track all the bugs and possible work around

#86

Sweet!! Fume FX for Maya at last! First quick test of nparticles driven by Fume (demo version so far but will surely get a full version asap ):

https://vimeo.com/69612731

If only nParticles came with some node based (eg. Thinking Particles-like) dynamic sim builder … ehhhh :slight_smile: - Duncan - please please please :smiley: writing all that MEL for simple things with nParticles is such a waste of time and nerves with syntax errors etc. :slight_smile:

#87

looks nice :slight_smile:

i also did some experiments, but i run into a probl with krakatoa,

for example there is no way to change FumeFx Particle emitter seed, so i could multiply the number of particles!?

maybe fumefx particles are not plan to have seed i dont know?

the only way to do this is to make a regular maya particles and do it this way…

cheers

#88

i agree with grucho

#89

so far the only way is to render is to use arnold :slight_smile:

works great

#90

Just put this in your PP creation expression of particles:

$gridSize = 1;
position += <<rand(-$gridSize,$gridSize), rand(-$gridSize,$gridSize), rand(-$gridSize,$gridSize)>>;

… where gridSize is your single container size in world scale and your seed is ready to go :slight_smile:

#91

Glad to see folks starting to use fumeFXMaya!

I’ll field a couple of these questions and forward some of the bugs/issues on to Afterworks,
I did a lot of the original code on the fume ParticleEmitter and fumeFollowField.

I think the emitter seed thing would be fairly easy to do, for now you can either do the mel creation fix above, or there is also a “jitter” parameter that will shake up the position on emission so its not so “grid-like” but even for that we’d need to add a seed value to do krakatoa type emission.

also, keep in mind that there is a “downrez” setting and also an “emission rate” setting

by default the emission rate of 1 puts one particle at each voxel that passes the sample tests…

downrezzing that reduces the voxel count.

If you set the rate up to a higher value than 1 , it will put multiply up the number of points per voxel by the standard 1/fps*rate noised in a standard maya way around that original voxel position.
hopefully this might help seed some sims for you.

On the Mental ray side of things… I’m not sure about the whole units thing, where did you read that?
I know that most every FX artist/company uses maya in standard CM units and “fakes” larger scales mentally when looking at values… Its even been stated straight from autodesk that it is better to do this for most dynamics cases. Try that as a first step… Especially since once you run the sim at any size you can always scale up the fume grid before render and everything should still work just fine. Mray shader is basically the same shader as comes with the Max version so it should work ok.

hit me up here with any other issues… or feel free to start up a new topic for fume bugs/wishlist stuff…
-johnc

#92

So I finally got to learn fumeFX for maya and it’s giving really great results. I did a render of a normal explosion with smoke that was 200 frames long in mental ray at production quality and it took ages to render at 1Kx1K. It seemed to take longer and longer with each render until it was over 30 minutes a frame. I’m not sure if that’s expected or that mental ray is slow to render fluids but I thought I’d try rendering in VRay. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to get it to work. I’ve added the maya spotlights to the fumeFX node via the relationship editor. Have tried various different lights, had raytrace enabled, etc… I understand that in max, vray can render fumeFX if you enable the atmospheric lighting checkbox, but there isn’t an equivalent setting in fumeFX for maya’s lights. Has anyone been able to render fumeFX using VRay? If you have, could you share your technique. We also have arnold, but I haven’t tried rendering in Arnold yet, but if anyone can confirm that fumeFX renders in Arnold, that would give me some confidence in trying to get it to work.

#93

FumeFX for Maya does not provide a V-Ray shader so this won’t work. If there is an option to convert the result to Maya fluids then it could perhaps work, but I doubt that it is possible. I’ve sent a sample V-Ray shader to Kresimir, so maybe they will get to that sometime soon. If they don’t, then you will have to wait until we support Field3D in the Phoenix FD shaders, so that you can use them to render the FumeFX caches.

Best regards,
Vlado

#94

great news vlado, could u add to the list openvdb?

cheers

#95

I haven’t tested it yet but a friend of mine has sent me mtoa render of Fume FX, so if he’s not pulling my leg you CAN render FumeFX under Maya using arnold.

#96

But Fume is in beta? If not a problem, can someone post an image? A video?
Thanks

#97

FumeFX for Maya is not beta any longer. :thumbsup:

#98

Sorry, but I can’t get to render Maya Fume FX using Arnold. I’ll get in touch with the friend who’ve sent me the fume rendered in Maya Arnold and verify, but it seems it works only with MR … out-of-the-box at least. Arnold does not recognize Fume shape as shader type :banghead:

Cheers,
M.

#99

amigo ur missing the main thing :), u dont have fume arnold extensions…

log into ur account on arnold web site and download the binary for fumefx

“We provide an alpha version of the FumeFX for Maya MtoA extension. Note this version is only for early testing, it might contain bugs, not all features are working, and we can change the behavior at any time. The final version will be distributed by Sitni Sati. Just extract the package into your MtoA deployment directory.”

hope this helps :wink:

cheers

#100

So here’s a question, I’m having trouble getting a simulated Fume grid to pass color data out to a particle system, so it can be rendered in Krakatoa. Has anyone accomplished this? The particle system itself renders fine.