BulletSOP 2.0 beta_v4 for Win64 and Linux64

[MilanSuk]

Hi,

In attachment you can find 2nd public beta version for BulletSOP 2.0. This version is for Linux and Windows. OSX is coming soon. I fixed few small problems and mainly I added 2 new scenes with building collapse! More info about this project: http://forums.odforc...a-v3-for-win64/

Now the worse part. I spent a lot of time on this and I have to make a living, so If we want to keep this project alive, I need to make it commercial. So please, take one minute and fill this survey: http://obsurvey.com/...C4-71248188D81C

Regards,

Milan Suk

EDIT : The latest beta v5: http://forums.odforc...sop-20-beta-v5/

bulletSOP_beta_v4_win64.zip

bulletSOP_beta_v4_linux64_gcc4_4.tar.gz

Edited February 15, 2013 by MilanSuk

[pclaes]

I really appreciate all the work you are doing and have been following this for a while. So just throwing this out there: Have you considered selling this to sidefx directly? -- perhaps even join them as a developer - they could probably use people with your expertise and it would benefit everyone.

I can imagine that the upkeep for each version of houdini will become a hassle after a while, just like software upkeep is a hassle at facilities too, so if instead it becomes part of the main application the upkeep costs would go away. That is kinda what happened with the cluster tools and the voronoi fracture, so it would not surprise me if sidefx is interested in this too.

Good luck with it!

[horizon1231]

Have you considered selling this to sidefx directly? --

as sidefx told,they don't want to implement bullet in sops.they want to keep framework of DOPs.if everything stays in sops would be faster then current version,but losing the beauty of houdini.

ppl in production really want speed and stability,thats why we all love Milan' work.

[MilanSuk]

I really appreciate all the work you are doing and have been following this for a while. So just throwing this out there: Have you considered selling this to sidefx directly? -- perhaps even join them as a developer - they could probably use people with your expertise and it would benefit everyone.

I can imagine that the upkeep for each version of houdini will become a hassle after a while, just like software upkeep is a hassle at facilities too, so if instead it becomes part of the main application the upkeep costs would go away. That is kinda what happened with the cluster tools and the voronoi fracture, so it would not surprise me if sidefx is interested in this too.

Good luck with it!

thx Peter,

I agree with horizont1231. Build pipeline inside SOP has worked already, for eg. movie 2012 where a lot of RBD sim was done by Digital Domain, with their implementation of Bullet in SOP. According Siggraph panel, their implementation is very similar to BulletSOP and of course we can use RBD sim to drive other solvers(dust, fire, smoke) inside DOP. But SESI always divide nodes to different networks.

I tried to have deal with Orbolt, which would be the easiest way for users and me. They are interested in my work, but unfortunately they are not prepared for selling c++(HDK) plugins. They have plans for this, but its not immediate future

At this moment I have`nt many options what I can do with this project. I will wait as Survey(100% anonymous) will have more users: http://obsurvey.com/...C4-71248188D81C

Edited February 3, 2013 by MilanSuk

[magneto]

I really appreciate all the work you are doing and have been following this for a while. So just throwing this out there: Have you considered selling this to sidefx directly? -- perhaps even join them as a developer - they could probably use people with your expertise and it would benefit everyone.

I can imagine that the upkeep for each version of houdini will become a hassle after a while, just like software upkeep is a hassle at facilities too, so if instead it becomes part of the main application the upkeep costs would go away. That is kinda what happened with the cluster tools and the voronoi fracture, so it would not surprise me if sidefx is interested in this too.

Good luck with it!

Can you please tell relatively new people like me the story/history of cluster tools and the voronoi fracture? Were they made by users outside SESI? My understanding was that SESI never added anything users made outside SESI, so basically anyone who is not a SESI developer.

If they do add them, then what's the procedure? Why was HOT not added?

@Milan, I was also wondering about your goals as I know this is alot of work to deal with so thanks for that. I wouldn't hold my breath for C++ support on Orbolt. I imagine that would happen when the store actually matures with a lot of useful content, which would be several years I think, and even then implementing everything to support C++ plugins would be a huge task.

I hope you make money either by selling it yourself or to SESI, or whatever else is possible.

PS I just filled the survey

[pclaes]

as sidefx told,they don't want to implement bullet in sops.they want to keep framework of DOPs.if everything stays in sops would be faster then current version,but losing the beauty of houdini.

ppl in production really want speed and stability,thats why we all love Milan' work.

Maybe there exists a middle-ground... kinda like what the 'solver sop' does - although that is still a bit different. Or a version of bullet in dops that has a reduced overhead so it runs faster.

I tried to have deal with Orbolt, which would be the easiest way for users and me. They are interested in my work, but unfortunately they are not prepared for selling c++(HDK) plugins. They have plans for this, but its not immediate future

Too bad indeed, it is a bit of a can of worms to try and support this from sidefx point of view. They generally only do it if the demand is high enough.

Here is another idea:

Start a kickstarter, set a goal and see how far you get with the community chipping in to potentially make your source code available as open source. I would chip in -- this is worth more than a bunch of training videos and might inspire you or others to create more tools too. Hopefully the survey will give you an idea of what price-range you can aim for.

I mentioned this as well when the orbolt store first opened:

Can you please tell relatively new people like me the story/history of cluster tools and the voronoi fracture? Were they made by users outside SESI? My understanding was that SESI never added anything users made outside SESI, so basically anyone who is not a SESI developer.

'The history of the cluster tools' ... It could be a title for a sci-fi novel haha. I'll induldge to go off track a bit. But let's keep this thread about Milan's great work - in a sense it will help him consider certain options he might not have been aware off.

You are correct to say they were made by users inside SESI, you are incorrect in thinking those users were always part of SESI.

*) Let's start with the voronoi tools - you have some reading to do if you want to know more, but basically John Lynch first implemented them as a digital asset. I even mentioned to him back then this should become part of houdini ( ). So he went on and joined sidefx for a few months to help develop and integrate the voronoi fracture tools. Some of the results of that is that the underlying worker nodes required, such as the tetrahedralize node ( which calculated the delaunay diagram) got implemented in the HDK.

*) Some of my own tools from my own thesis on fluids made it into houdini as well - back then there were no 'attribute to volume' or 'volume to attribute' tools. These are now part of the volume sourcing sop. You could go further to say that back then we had to set up the source relationship, rather than add the fields directly to whatever we wanted to add it to (which is a much more straightforward way of thinking about it). -- The source relationship has now been mostly replaced with the source volume dop. -- Everyone is influenced by ideas and work from others, even in my own thesis I gave thanks and had access to the mind of a friend and colleague, his name is Coen Klosters. Coen is quite an exceptional individual who started out at Bournemouth doing his masters when I was finishing my undergrad - we got along well. He went on to do the sidefx internship in Toronto (the developers office), where he did a great job working together with Jeff Lait to develop the pyrotools. Then he came back to London and joined Cinesite, and so did I when I graduated. This is where the team had to handle massive amounts of data for the scorpion sequence in the first Wrath of the Titans. And then later we had to handle even more data for the Thern in John Carter. Coen went back to Sidefx after that, this time as a developer, and that is when a lot of the cluster tools were developed as they help partition massive datasets so they can be processed in parallel.

--- Have a look at the credits, see how many names you can recognize (I know around 30 of these names at the moment and have worked with some of them directly) - http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini12.1/credits

*) The fast point instancer... hmmm, a few years back I was trying to develop my own instancer for the HDK ( http://www.peterclaes.be/blog/?p=151 ) - as a lot of people needed that kind of functionality and it already had been developed at a lot of studios for renderman - but was being kept propreitary. It is not a super difficult thing to implement, but it is very useful. And now it is part of houdini through the "fast (point) instancer". Back then I was thinking to turn that entire project into another tutorial dvd, but I did not have the time for it -- and I am not the best c++ programmer either -- so sharing it with the community and igniting other people's passion and interest in rendertime geometry was pretty cool to see - and I learned a lot through the follow up discussions too.

*) OpenVDB - This has got to be one of the most exciting new collaboratively developed toolsets in recent years. I wish there were more R&D aggreements with sidefx like the one with dreamworks.

If they do add them, then what's the procedure? Why was HOT not added?

I don't really think there is a strict procedure. All of the above shows that if there is enough interest in the community it will find it's way into houdini. It is a feedback loop of itself. You share something (tool/setup/idea) with the community, someone else picks it up, develops it some more, posts it back,... and when enough people do that it starts trending and feature requests are made to sidefx or even outside TDs directly approach sidefx because they strongly believe a certain setup and tool can make a big difference for the benefit of the software as a whole.

Same goes for HOT, Maya had some ocean tools for years, but not sure how much they were actually used in production. Then Naiad came along (as well as improvements in CPU/GPU) and it became possible to simulate and interact with really large bodies of water. This is thanks to the FLIP/PIC research and Robert Bridson willingess to share so much of this research with the community. But of course you don't want to simulate an entire ocean, so now integration between HOT and Flip fluids is a focus point. Again, when enough shots require that kind of work and it starts trending it will find it's way into houdini.

-- Sidefx as a company is quite visionary, part of that vision also comes from their user base and the attention they pay to their users. If every studio develops their own bullet sop implementation, sidefx must realize there is a huge demand for that - at that point it is only a matter of time. And when it finally gets implemented it changes things in such a way that people don't even realize how the workflow was in the past.

-- So, Milan, in my opinion, if you really want to 'force the issue', the first step is to make the source code available (kickstarter or sell it or whatever) and get this project trending as a community project. That way demand is building because when people move from one place to the next they will want to be able to create these kind of rbd effects. Granted, a lot of studios already have their own implementation... but how long do you think they will keep updating their internal in-house versions when there is a completely community supported version out there that somebody is working on for the latest version of houdini. People want to work efficiently, and if they can use the same tool between facilities without having to learn in-house tools this will save the facility time/money as well. And then when the community is used to having this tool, they will start to wonder why it is not part of houdini already? And they will complain -- as software users always do -- but in a good and constructive fashion, the way the houdini community has a wishlist. I wonder if "bullet in sops" already made it onto the H13 wishlist. If not... only a matter of time. You might as well be the one to spearhead this -- others have joined sidefx to help develop certain things (even if it was only for half a year or so), perhaps this could be an option for you too.

[CeeGee]

Beta4 tests.

http://www.igorfx.com/bullet/building01_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.com/bullet/building02_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.com/bullet/building03_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.com/bullet/building04_bullet_b4.mov

[MilanSuk]

Why was HOT not added?

My guess is that there is a patent.

Here is another idea:

Start a kickstarter, set a goal and see how far you get with the community chipping in to potentially make your source code available as open source. I would chip in -- this is worth more than a bunch of training videos and might inspire you or others to create more tools too. Hopefully the survey will give you an idea of what price-range you can aim for.

I mentioned this as well when the orbolt store first opened:

http://forums.odforc...__36#entry97920

I am from Czech republic, so I can not create project on kickstarter(in EU is for GB only, I think). And I am really thinking, how many user can houdini has and how many are interested in RBD sims? Beta_3 has 160downloads(not users) for windows only and Survey has 26 votes at this moment. So where are they? Any ideas how make this project more visible?

-- Sidefx as a company is quite visionary, part of that vision also comes from their user base and the attention they pay to their users.

True story!

Granted, a lot of studios already have their own implementation... but how long do you think they will keep updating their internal in-house versions

This is very good remark! Of course I will sell full Source code(I need to buy commercial licence of Houdini first), but this remark is good reason for smaller studio, because keeping some internal tool updated takes a lot of money(updates of source code will be free) + of course they cannot develop this tool for this money(at this moment I have around 6000lines of good structure code and counting)

Beta4 tests.

http://www.igorfx.co...1_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...2_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...3_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...4_bullet_b4.mov

great R&D

Edited February 3, 2013 by MilanSuk

[pclaes]

So where are they? Any ideas how make this project more visible?

Not everyone is involved with the forums. Some people just find out in different ways. Also even though you have been working on this for over a year now, you just released it, run the survey for at least a month. Some productions are running on older builds of houdini and only switch every so many months.

--- Also one thing to consider which I found missing in the survey is a field that simply says: "suggestions". That way you will get advice or feedback from the people taking the survey - it might provide you with more insight.

In regards to visibility, it is about marketing. Get some cool R&D videos going (such as the one Igor made -- he did similar stuff for naiad, I bet it helped a ton for their marketing too ). Get them on Vimeo, get them on cgsociety, perhaps get them to be picked up by 3dtotal, cgchannel, frontpage of sidefx.... . Frontpage of odforce is cool, but many users (like myself) have the forum bookmarked, not the front page. Make some demo videos like this one:

Make a logo/design/icon out of "bulletsop".

Make a website/blog for it, that links in with the various forums, but gathers all the eye candy in one place. Technical support can still be on odforce if you like -- even then, a "downloads" page is a minimum, to make sure people can easily download the latest version when you have made changes/fixes.

-- it would perhaps be a good idea to contact some of the guys on this forum and see if you can make some videos that show off both your tools:

Sergei's fracturing tool comes to mind:

-- Perhaps talk with this guy too:

[magneto]

Thanks alot Peter for taking the time to write all this. I appreciate it. Reading more about the history is always good

I remember your kickstarter idea, I think that's a fantastic idea. Don't think it's done in this field yet. I only know one guy trying to raise $400k for training videos.

@Milan: I didn't know kickstarter was restricted to certain countries. That's not good.

But what about indiegogo? I know it's just as good as kickstarter. I know people raising millions there too

My only worry is if a significant amount of money can be raised. I mean it's a really niche field, and Houdini even nicher. I imagine if you had something like Vray for the first time for Max, it could make a lot of money, due to the number of Max users, and the use of the plugin itself.

[almatea]

Beta4 tests.

http://www.igorfx.co...1_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...2_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...3_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...4_bullet_b4.mov

Very impressive!!

It is first complex test for this plugin that I saw.

Did you use constraints for that sims?

Edited February 4, 2013 by almatea

[almatea]

May be it would be useful to use this plugin inside SOP solver inside DOP : )

[CeeGee]

Very impressive!!

It is first complex test for this plugin that I saw.

Did you use constraints for that sims?

Yes all this tests have constraints

On first 2 test you can see constraints image

[djwarder]

Beta4 tests.

http://www.igorfx.co...1_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...2_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...3_bullet_b4.mov

http://www.igorfx.co...4_bullet_b4.mov

So amazing! This is what I wanted to see in Houdini for a long time!

[MilanSuk]

pclaes: so We needs some kick ass trailer

May be it would be useful to use this plugin inside SOP solver inside DOP : )

yes, at this moment there is no scene, where it would interact with DOP solvers, I will look on that!

So amazing! This is what I wanted to see in Houdini for a long time!

you can get better results, but It takes a lot of time to set right values, but of course because It simulates very fast you can make more sims and be closer to result what you wanted.

Igor and me are working on even more cool scenes

Edited February 4, 2013 by MilanSuk

[CeeGee]

New low res test, no constraints

http://www.igorfx.com/bullet/building05c_bullet_b4.mov

Rendering 100 000 object sim now

[MilanSuk]

I added this "snake" scene to example file. It will be public with next beta

[pbarua]

Hi,

In attachment you can find 2nd public beta version for BulletSOP 2.0. This version is for Linux and Windows. OSX is coming soon. I fixed few small problems and mainly I added 2 new scenes with building collapse! More info about this project: http://forums.odforc...a-v3-for-win64/

Now the worse part. I spent a lot of time on this and I have to make a living, so If we want to keep this project alive, I need to make it commercial. So please, take one minute and fill this survey: http://obsurvey.com/...C4-71248188D81C

Regards,

Milan Suk

Just did survey. Thanx for valuable tool Milan.

[GeT]

Milan, this tool is extremely fast, i just installed this and it's amazing, THANK YOU!!!

[CeeGee]

Final

http://www.igorfx.com/bullet/building05_bullet_b4.mov