Autodesk has announced a new update to Bifrost for Maya with new features designed to simplify the creation and delivery of complex simulations and custom effects using real-time tool feedback and several other enhancements, including:
- Virtual Sliders that allow fluid ports to be adjusted in real-time with dynamic constants and F-curves to be edited live. With feedback port preservation, artist simulations stay intact during graph edits, pausing, and unpausing, while the ability to edit live simulations shortens time between iterations.
- Broken Bifrost graphs can now be fixed with unknown nodes. Users can now also merge JSON files into single large files, which facilitates faster loading in as little as two seconds. Faster loading further improves time to the first pixel in the first Arnold render in a session.
- Artists can now use fields and arrays to directly drive simulation parameters, making simulation graphics more expressive, readable, and artistically directable.
- Aero’s post-simulation now only requires a single connection, simplifying refinement workflows. The required data can be cached with the volume to perform a post-simulation refinement from disk, without the original simulation scene. This update has also improved MPM Cloth performance and simulation stability, as well as animation cloth and shell properties.
- Maya’s viewport display of adaptive volumes features significant enhancements, and volume adaptivity can now be accessed on simulation compounds to improve performance for input meshes that require conversion. Non-adaptive volumes also now use the adaptive algorithm for accelerated conversions.
- The Alembic integration now supports writing and reading for more Bifrost user data and corrects the handling of quaternions and matrices. Bugs with writing OpenVDB have also been corrected for more robust interaction with the ecosystem of OpenVDB readers and writers, and sparse OpenVDB files can be converted to adaptive Bifrost volumes.
- Terminals are now out of beta and ready for production. Terminals now also work in loops, enabling each iteration to add geometry to a scene.
Find out more on the Maya blog.
Sad to see the great Naiad now as a lonely plugin for a dead software.
How is it dead ?
The development of maya is pretty dead.
Also bifrost development isn’t same what it was when it was naiad – naiad make great progress and real innovations. Maya really need weta digitals tools.
https://cgpress.org/archives/bifrost-for-maya-updated.html#comment-95870
Looks alive
Let’s be realistic, Blender already beat Maya in VFX and it’s becoming industry standard in character animation nowadays, so no AD, you are don’t know what you doing, just die
How?, they both work ,they both have pitfalls, they both have strengths, I don’t like AD one bit but (using your own words) Let’s be realistic, AD is not going anywhere for a long time, and even thou I love it, Blender still has a long way to go mostly in the interoperability department
sure it is. Only studio using blender (mainly) for animation, just go bancrupt couple of days ago.
Funnily enough:
Apparently everything went smooth as long as they were on Blender but when they tried to switch to Houdini/Maya based pipeline too fast for a new project, that’s when it fell apart.
apparently they could’nt no longer work with blender, and it was to late to save company. Now again. Tell me. how is Maya dead. What are companies working on? They animate in Houdini? Hmmm?
They state that they ditched their Blender based toolset in a “blind hunger to grow”. It certainly would not be first time a large VFX studio was flown into the ground by upper management making poor decisions.
So they were forced(?) to ditch their exclusively Blender pipeline and use Maya/Houdini, which they had little experience with, within a short time frame. If they only made this decision in an attempt to grow the studio, that suggests Maya still dominates the animation industry.
I have no clue… All I see is the same post as you do. I don’t have any more information as to why.
Reading what you want to read here? From the screenshot (if it’s true) it just means they wanted to switch to a professional pipeline in a too short amount of time. This has nothing to do with functionality (well, maybe it has, but not for my argument anyway) but with making bad decisions regarding planning.
Isn’t that *exactly* what I wrote couple of posts above?
“They state that they ditched their Blender based toolset in a “blind hunger to grow”. It certainly would not be first time a large VFX studio was flown into the ground by upper management making poor decisions.”
I replied to a post that implies Blender was the reason Tangent shut down.
Im just tired of You, blender trolls, trashing every thread. Max update, blender fanboys teens. Maya updata blender teen trolls. You have noe experience, no wisdom, just fanatism. GO TO BLENDER THREADS. Simple as that. Take care of Yourseves, Your time will come. But stop selling LIES.
What’s wrong with you? Where do you see me being a fanboy of Blender? Saying that using Blender was the reason Tangent has shut down is about as dumb as saying Blender already beat Maya in VFX and it’s becoming industry standard.
Both are dumb, false statement, but you can’t really counter a dumb, false statement with another one, which you did. It doesn’t work that way.
Apologies Ludvik, indeed i didn’t read the text below the image. Seems the onslaught of blender fanboys has put me on a hair trigger.
troll and mdko: Blender fanboys you say and see everywhere? 😀 sounds like you have problems to avoid these blender “fanboys” – just skip their messages and thats it because we all know that maya is the only good software for every needed tasks and it still rules the world with absolutely best tools with best and most affordable price to get real professional tools.
Please tell me you’re being sarcastic here. I am not fan of Autodesk but geez statements like this are completely disconnected from reality.
Agree.
Maya is dead (the software is made of a completely out of date codebase, which is what happens with 20 years of patches and no rework).
Unreal Engine 1 was released in 1998, same year for Maya.
However Unreal went through multiple complete code rewrites, when maya never did so.
Still, no studio except a tiny minority like Tangent animation, and some low-end Ubisoft TV series uses Blender.
Maya is still by far the goto software for almost any studio.
Blender users are nuts. They talk like they are using software no one else can afford.
just that most blender users are kids.
you are right.. blender users are kids when they try to play with their poor software.. they are just jealous because they have no afford for maya which is the standard for professional works. they are kids… and kids are always jealous to us.. to real pros bro.
As someone who switched from 3ds max to Blender for 90% of my work.I still go back to 3ds max to use vray for rendering and in some cases forest pack. And I really enjoy the software. It fits my needs for my freelance work.
But reading comments like that about Blender makes me bang my head against my desk every time.
Yes Blender is gaining traction fast. And it is only going to get better from here on but it’s not in any position where it did “beat” anyone. It’s a more than solid product for a very affordable price and a lot of people can do their work with just blender and don’t have to pay into any subscription or buy anything to make a living with it and produce good quality work.
BUT there are tasks in this industry where Blender as of right now can’t compete and isn’t competing. And it isn’t changed by how much people want to see the big Goliaths fall. It is not happening anytime soon.
Seriously? Blender is good in a lot of areas, but if you compare it with Maya in VFX, I dont see in what its superior. Particles, Cloth, liquids, smoke, I will never say are the strength of Blender right now.
As a Blender based studio Owner and Blender user and enthusiast I completely agree
Agree, Blender has to improve in the VFX area a lot.
it has a good simulation engine under the hood, Mantaflow, but it lacks features that gives you art direction capabilities, it also lacks a powerful adaptive particle system, a modern cloth solver and proper hair toolset, in all those areas what Blender currently has is good, but old, outdated, and lacks features.
update is coming though 🙂
You seem to be smart, keep it up:)
Really? For me Maya is the king of Animation but VFX has shifted towards Houdini since years. Even in Max, I see more and better Particle Tools with Thinking Particles’ ans Tyflow. We still teach Maya on our university, but I can tell you that more and more student shift to Blender and Houdini, so I’m pretty sure that Blender could be very the new Industry Standard.
baby Blender Trolls :
today maya is dead
tomorow maya is dead
next week maya is dead
next month maya is dead
next year maya is dead
and years and years and years ……… maya is dead
finaly baby blender trolls are dead
maya is live :))))))))
OMG you Trolls are Funny :))))))))
max is dead too, You have to remember. Like for 15 years now.
I agree, I use Max now for 20 years and I felt it already in 2010 where a lot of VFX work shifted towards other software…after a long time of getting nothing new 2018-2020 was (for Max^^) good years, but now it stagnates again 🙁 … with “Excalibur” Autodesk promised us a new start (total code rewriting) in 2010 … that would have been the only right choice – but sadly it never happened or was stopped from Autodesk.