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Bifrost vs Houdini


Grucho

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I just saw this video: 

 

It seems to have really cool features. What do you think? Will it be better then flip in houdini?

 

Great tech managed by a company that kills great tech. i.e  XSi

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Well, to be fair on 'em... Marcus Nordenstam and Robert Bridson seem to be the originators of the FLIP fluid technique in the first place.  If anything, SideFX followed Naiad in that regard, presumably based off of Robert Bridson's papers.

The "new" foam sim approach in Bifrost does appear to be borrowing heavily from the way it's implemented in Houdini however (which incidentally, was one of the big differences that convinced me to ditch Naiad for Houdini in the first place), so it appears they are taking queues from SideFX in some regards.

 

The "adaptive" sim resolution feature could be a really enormous advance, even though they appear to make very little of it in the video.

I really hope SideFX are looking into something along these lines too... the biggest thing holding back FLIP fluids at the moment is the need to have uniform resolution throughout a sim.  It pretty much prohibits any major deep-water simulation.

 

I don't doubt the Bifrost guys will turn out a solid package, and who knows, maybe they'll manage to turn Maya into a decent procedural-FX tool.  But I think I'll probably be sticking with Houdini for a while yet.  It would take a lot to convince me to venture back to Maya these days :-)

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The naiad tech that bifrost is based from is decent and even better than houdini in certain situations regarding fluid simulation but it'll be years before Autodesk has these kind of suggested workflows commonplace in regular maya environments.

 

Engine will be big by then though :v

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naiad's solver (and mesher) may be better than houdini's, but i find the ability to insert my own code into the solver is pretty important.  with houdini, i can use familiar tools to adjust flip particles, cull them, create them, manipulate fields, etc between each solve iteration.  pretty potent.

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naiad's solver (and mesher) may be better than houdini's...

 

Oh-ho-ho!... Let's not get carried away here :-P

 

I'd say Houdini's FLIP solution is at least on parity with where Naiad was in it's final incarnation, possibly a bit more solid and scalable since it's had the odd memory issue patched.  The advantages of Naiad's adaptive tileset approach has been pretty much offset by Houdini's ability to process massive grid resolutions quickly and I get the impression it runs a sort of sparse-solve anyway.  The mathematical accuracy of the solve appears to be just as good.  (Unlike Realflow, which seems to make everything look a little bit like silly-string)

 

The meshing left Naiad way behind the moment VDBs hit the scene... I can mesh my sims to much higher levels of detail, in less than a tenth of the time, and as an added bonus end up with a cleaner, lower poly mesh, as VDBs seem to give you near-perfect poly-reduction for free.  It's a world apart!

 

I suspect Bifrost will catch up in that regard at least, but for the moment at least, Houdini's king of the FLIP hill :-)

Edited by danw
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Imho Bifrost will be "around" Maya users,that means less controll,less complicated stuff.

Hope bifrost evolve to something like ICE but we are talking about AD,they can fire Marcus tomorrow if they dont make enought money.

I can predict lots of foam "test" in the next months  :P

Edited by georgeivan
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  • 4 weeks later...

Well, to be fair on 'em... Marcus Nordenstam and Robert Bridson seem to be the originators of the FLIP fluid technique in the first place.  If anything, SideFX followed Naiad in that regard, presumably based off of Robert Bridson's papers.

The "new" foam sim approach in Bifrost does appear to be borrowing heavily from the way it's implemented in Houdini however (which incidentally, was one of the big differences that convinced me to ditch Naiad for Houdini in the first place), so it appears they are taking queues from SideFX in some regards.

 

The "adaptive" sim resolution feature could be a really enormous advance, even though they appear to make very little of it in the video.

I really hope SideFX are looking into something along these lines too... the biggest thing holding back FLIP fluids at the moment is the need to have uniform resolution throughout a sim.  It pretty much prohibits any major deep-water simulation.

 

I don't doubt the Bifrost guys will turn out a solid package, and who knows, maybe they'll manage to turn Maya into a decent procedural-FX tool.  But I think I'll probably be sticking with Houdini for a while yet.  It would take a lot to convince me to venture back to Maya these days :-)

Everybody steals from everybody, that's has been the case before and that's how is gonna be, of course avoid getting sued though :)

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  • 1 month later...

Superficially sure, but you can do this well or poorly. Apple does it well.

 

Apple does the same thing with Hardware, and they're a pretty profitable company.

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