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New Bifrost features which seem very powerful


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I haven't tried bifrost in 2016, but I did some tests with 2015 and I really like the background cache feature.   But looking at these videos, the speed of getting the smoke trails was pretty impressive.  I think you can do the same thing with pops, and then convert them to vdb's to get a nice volume look.

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Although these improvements are probably very cool, usually upon inspection it's already in Houdini or it's demo magic. Perhaps I'm wrong though.

 

Remember the formula - Reality = demo*0.15 ;)

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I haven't tried bifrost in 2016, but I did some tests with 2015 and I really like the background cache feature.   But looking at these videos, the speed of getting the smoke trails was pretty impressive.  I think you can do the same thing with pops, and then convert them to vdb's to get a nice volume look.

In Houdini 14 we also now enjoy background caching. 

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Remember the formula - Reality = demo*0.15 ;)

 

i'm sure the equation is also working with hollywood making-of ! :)

 

i'm also waiting the day were cloth / rbd / pyro / pop / wire / sand / flip will interact each other in Maya ... probably 2023 !

i will maybe be feeding goat in the mountain in that timelapse ...

Edited by sebkaine
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One reason because I love maya and max is to get ideas to make OTLs.

The two videos show stuff that you can do in Houdini since at least couple of years ago.

They are cool as user tools and nice ideas to pack into OTLs.

Most of the time useless in production because they don't scale or because of the workflow.

I hope now in biofrost sims can scale decenly. But the workflow.

Damn looking at these demos and watching the guy clicking on tabs, endless parameters dialogs and actually you don't have any idea and control of what is going on, this is the big problem.

But anyway I think Biofrost is a really good flip solver packed into a bad designed tool for fx.

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Anyone have ideas about the Maya 2016 'optimized rig evaluation'; which operations can you run on the gpu to get 2x+ speedups over a 36 core Cpu? i.e. matrix ops etc

 

Assuming it’s the top of the line Hp z840 with K6000 vs 2x E5-2699 v3 (2.3 GHz, 45 MB cache, 18 cores)

 

 

'Improved animation performance with a parallel evaluation system takes advantage of the CPU and GPU to increase the speed of both playback and character rig manipulation.'

 

 

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Anyone have ideas about the Maya 2016 'optimized rig evaluation'; which operations can you run on the gpu to get 2x+ speedups over a 36 core Cpu? i.e. matrix ops etc

 

Assuming it’s the top of the line Hp z840 with K6000 vs 2x E5-2699 v3 (2.3 GHz, 45 MB cache, 18 cores)

 

I'd guess it's related to the LibEE work from Martin Watts/Mark Hampton, which DreamWorks uses in their Premo animation system:

 

LibEE (PDF)

Parallel Evaluation of Character Rigs (PDF)

Edited by goldleaf
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Guest mantragora

Yup. Basically, smoke and mirrors.

i'm also waiting the day were cloth / rbd / pyro / pop / wire / sand / flip will interact each other in Maya ... probably 2023 !

i will maybe be feeding goat in the mountain in that timelapse ...

You lost me at clicking tabs...

Damn looking at these demos and watching the guy clicking on tabs, endless parameters dialogs and actually you don't have any idea and control of what is going on, this is the big problem.

But anyway I think Biofrost is a really good flip solver packed into a bad designed tool for fx.

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'Improved animation performance with a parallel evaluation system takes advantage of the CPU and GPU to increase the speed of both playback and character rig manipulation.'

 

Perhaps they implemented something like our GPU-accelerated crowd deformation? We currently do threaded evaluation of the rigs on the CPU, and the vertex deformation of the agents on the GPU. Been toying with the idea of a compute shader for rig evaluation, but that might overload the GPU a bit.

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"The two videos show stuff that you can do in Houdini since at least couple of years ago."

 

Hey Pablo, is there a way to increase and decrease the amount of whitewater created based on the camera frustum? I'd love to know :)

 

Also the adaptivity shown by some older bifrost video looks really interesting...never played with it though..

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"The two videos show stuff that you can do in Houdini since at least couple of years ago."

 

Hey Pablo, is there a way to increase and decrease the amount of whitewater created based on the camera frustum? I'd love to know :)

 

Also the adaptivity shown by some older bifrost video looks really interesting...never played with it though..

 

About the whitewater LOD, thats totally possible inside Houdini, You can sample a distance from camera and use as a factor for a replicator for the whitewater emission, also if you want you can use the same setup with a point procedural as a post process for replication at rendertime.

 

All its possible inside Houdini, but I really hope that SESI, give us some love for the SPH and some forgiven solvers.

Edited by Pazuzu
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Perhaps they implemented something like our GPU-accelerated crowd deformation?

Mmmm I need to read the two papers from dream works but I think is more in the line of parallel graph evaluation.

And here Houdini is not really good, is pretty slow evaluating world transforms in complex hierarchies.

Said that, all the tests I have seen from latest Maya version are good, but not really impressive.

What is impressive is the parallel evaluation done by Fabric Engine and how it keeps interactivity in the viewport so good.

Now that SESI seems to be looking more on character animation, Fabric Engine is the stuff to test against.

I'm not a fan of it, basically because it adds another layer of software, but the performance for characters is really really good.

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"The two videos show stuff that you can do in Houdini since at least couple of years ago."

 

Hey Pablo, is there a way to increase and decrease the amount of whitewater created based on the camera frustum? I'd love to know :)

 

Also the adaptivity shown by some older bifrost video looks really interesting...never played with it though..

About the White water stuff, yes is perfectly doable, I have been using techniques based on distance to camera for water effects since time ago.

About the adaptive to in biofrost, can you be more concrete, adaptivity of what?

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Thanks Alejandro,

I was not aware...I did use camera frustum with pyro solver but never tried with any other solvers, I guess it should work as well.

 

This is what I was talking about Pablo:

 

https://youtu.be/DucKeXM_gHM?t=14m14s

 

Voxel Adaptivity based on object collision, camera position and whatnot..

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