Axiom 3 released
Oct 28, 2022 by CGPress Staff
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Matt Puchala has announced the release of Axiom 3 for Houdini, the latest version of his volumetric fluid simulator that can run true sparse simulations fully on a GPU for the fast creation of fire, smoke, and other pyrotechnic effects. New features and updates include:
- 16-bit float fields. Lower precision grids with half the memory footprint.
- Native Cuda support for Nvidia GPUs.
- Native Metal support on macOS with compatible devices.
- Native Arm support for Apple Silicon devices.
- Device + system memory usage. The solver can use system memory in addition to GPU memory. This is helpful for larger simulations that can’t fit entirely into GPU memory. Only available when using Metal or Cuda.
- Larger neighbor tile cache sizes. Speeds up faster moving and/or higher resolution simulations.
- Faster advection tracing.
- Improved project non-divergent. Produces less artifacting and is more stable.
- Solver is anywhere from 8-32% faster overall.
- 3rd disturbance and turbulence force.
- Disturbance seed parameter.
- Velocity drag.
- Source shape transform handles.
- Source shapes can now inherit the orientation of their input instead of just the size.
- Plane type source shape. Anything below the plane will be affected.
- Source shapes can now composite values when overlapping. For example, you can have multiple influences overlapping with different forces.
- Updated to the latest NanoVDB version.
- Many small performance optimizations.
Find out more about Axiom on the product’s website.
Remember when you switched from mental ray to redshift and your mind was blown… This is like the same thing but for pyro sims!
Redshift? No way Redshift could do half the shit Mental Ray could, The real Mind blow came when you switch from Mental Ray to Arnold and see the IPR render Hair as you go!
Axiom is very simple and fast. That’s cool it fit the “CPU” ram now. Would like to give a try. I stopped with the free version back in the days.
Hope redshift will have a good volume shader soon. Look like multiscatter on volume is coming. Good combo for freelancers and small studio
I know it is not the topic, but I always recall some interesting facts when talking about MR: “Jurassic Park” Year 1993 (the first, best one), was rendered with MentalRay. The final scene, where all those dinosaurs fight in the hall, was rendered in MentalRay – with only 3 point lights(!).
No GI, PathTracing, no NormalMaps, no Mumbo-Jumbo.
Just artists, who know how to paint a digital picture.
And it still looks more striking then 99% of what I see today in almost any other art blog/gallery/short-film done with RedShift or Vray.
True all that except that jurassic park 1993 was renderman not mental ray. Notably the use of rendermans motion blur capabilities and rendertime displacements even for the time. Not aware though if anything in a specific shot was mental ray. Could be the case.
Right, thanks for the correction; I have always in my head the Screenshots of wireframes and animations of dinosaurs in “Jurrasic Park”, done with SoftImage, and then I think automatically on MentalRay.
Whatever renderer what used – 3 point lights were the keypoint i’ve taken, and that the good artist is many times more valuable then a renderer (yet).
Mentalray was dreadful but also a lot of good stuff was not exposed i guess for them having contract work. I remember in CG Society some Italian had shown some good shaders and other stuff that improved it a lot.
Mentalray in my opinion was one of the reasons for Softimage demise. They where always last to implement/expose some new stuff.
I used it in Softimage and just wanted Vray.
Mental ray had some of the best shaders and shader control in any renderer, the look of mr was special even with all its fg shortcomings. You just had a lot of control kver the image once you knew the ins and outs.
I miss the golden days of Brazil and MR. It seemed there was something special around every corner back then and you didnt get this overcrowded copy pasted situation in the field today, were quantity over quality reigns and drag and drop is king.
Remember how every cg cinematic from blur or blizzard was special… Aah weres the wine boy! and bring me close to that fireplace let me tell you stories my sons…
Oh and it was Autodesk not lack of mental ray exposition that killed Softimage, mental ray in softimage was more exposed at the time than the latest max that supported it. We had to do a hundred tricks just to get the skin+ shader to work in max and some of the other parameters exposed. Max was always behind in mr integration but still kicked butt.
“Remember how every cg cinematic from blur or blizzard”… Oh, yes… awesome stuff!
Remember also that the first WarCraft Cinematics were rendered with Scanline. A bunch of spotlights, no GI, StandardMaterial (no PBR), Hair&Fur as Plugin, minimal compositing and CPUs slower then a generic Huawei MobilePhone … And still they look today more exciting then a majority of stuff I see from the newer productions. 🙂
I wholeheartedly agree, Warcraft 3 cinematics are gold and masterful work, not to mention Diablo 2 expansion and warcraft frozen throne ones. Damn Diablo was using Clothreys! Kids these days have no idea what they missed growing up in the 90’s
It’s time to think about your new career. Sounds like you don’t enjoy cg anymore
No its a realization of a few who have lived through the golden days to see the degradation of a field through time. This is good to know because it makes you aware of what is good vs bad and not to fall into “trends”. Its a valuable experience only the past generation that lived thorough the birth of CGI have that gives them a potential unique to them/us.
I mean, you still can do your own project if you don’t like Hollywood shit anymore. Just for your pleasure. Don’t need to follow a trend and wait for “likes” in your favorite SNS.
But I have new career.
Missing the Underground? 🙂
@William: It was ClothReyes (not Clothreys).
Javier Reyes may get offended if he’s around.
Cheers all!
Hi Pablo 🙂
“Missing the Underground?”
I have never left it – don’t worry, CGPress (or MaxUnderground) is still the first webpage I open everyday when I come in the studio 😉
Ehm…to the nostalgia fans here…I started in 1997 with Lightwave 3D and hell, no, I don’t remember that as the good old days! I don’t want to ever spend 10-30K on software and even more on hardware which is slower than any raspberry pi. I hated working in wireframes because shading wasn’t possible to work with interactively, I hated waiting for “IPR” renders, I don’t want to use hacks to imitate GI or go back to phong shading because diffuse reflections are too heavy to compute. I hated those days and I love having my literal super computer at home which allows me to edit 4K in real-time, render 3d in all kinds of resolution locally and composite that stuff. We’re living in great times, despite what’s going on!
I think you missed the point. Back in the day is was an artform by itself to get good images out, right now throw a hdri and you have an outdoor scene for rendering that looks exactly like a thousand other outdoor scenes created in 10 seconds flooding the artstation of the internet.