zfluid .. anybody working on anything similiar ?

[ranxerox]

hey all, I've been playing with this in maya:

.. I must say it's really nice.. but then again, it's maya .. is anybody working on anything similiar to this in houdini. I would love to develop it myself, but I really don't have time.

-ranxx

[Marc]

I know nothing about Maya, so I don't really know what zfluids are. Is it the fluid sim that the points are simmed in, or the rendering of the points that you're interested in?

They're both doable, I just need to know what you're talking about first .

M

[Stalkerx777]

Zfluids

Interesting, i saw here somewhere in forum, huge amount of particles done in houdini, but there was a lot of custom stuff written through HDK. Or maybe i'm wrong...

Edited May 8, 2010 by Stalkerx777

[wigal123]

The main advantage is the speed of computation on the GPU. The disadvantage is the limitation of the graphics card memory. Would be very cool to have something like that for houdini, GPU accelerated methods in general!

[Marc]

Yeah there's no gpu stuff yet in Houdini. We have thought about it though . As for the rest, I've simmed over 10 million particles before using wedges, and then rendered them all as points in one pass. Mantra handled it fairly well, albeit using a lot of RAM. Advecting 10 million points through a fluid sim is perfectly doable too.

If you want to artificially pad your particle count, you could try using Mark Story's clusterthis procedural... but it depends on what you want to do .

M

[ranxerox]

yeah, it's more a question of speed. I know houdini can handle it, but if you look at the incredible speed ups available by using the gpu, it really becomes compelling. If you look at his sim times, and play with his plugin, even on a relatively inexpensive graphics card it's pretty amazing. I would love to get a few of the new tesla boxes, but until gpu acceleration becomes more prominent in some of the higher end graphics packages I have to hold off. It's probably only a matter of time until houdini starts supporting this, I guess I should contact Side Effects directly and make a request.

-ranxx

Yeah there's no gpu stuff yet in Houdini. We have thought about it though . As for the rest, I've simmed over 10 million particles before using wedges, and then rendered them all as points in one pass. Mantra handled it fairly well, albeit using a lot of RAM. Advecting 10 million points through a fluid sim is perfectly doable too.

If you want to artificially pad your particle count, you could try using Mark Story's clusterthis procedural... but it depends on what you want to do .

M