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Ah yes…that thing that isn’t in Max…very impressive.
Sounds interesting and of course these guys know what they are doing as shown by Naiad. I do wish someone would have asked what output formats they plan to support. I imagine OpenVDB and Alembic are given? Will it have an SDK so 3rd party developers like Thinkbox can write a PRT write node? Also hope it will save out all the channels like Naiad did, including custom ones, but I hope that’s a given.
The Product Designer of Bifrost assured me that they already have a BIF2PRT converter. And I have seen foam particles rendered in Krakatoa 🙂 Once the API is ready, we will be able to read the data directly from the simulation, but for now, a conversion tool is better than nothing.
That’s great news Bobo, thank you!
The surface tension model looks promising.
There’s some things I thought about it that caught my eye. BiFrost will receive a lot of ICE things, that’s good, but, he said that customers said ICE was hard to learn. Well, Softimage and ICE are probably easier than Maya itself, so they are a little bit in trouble.
He talks about levels, from the TD to the ‘compound’ (an ICE term) for the artists to make use of fewer options to get the result. That already existed in ICE and it’s something similar to what Houdini is doing with the digital assets with Houdini Engine. So again, no innovation, more copying to be honest.
From what Marcus said, BiFrost will scale better and it’s more robust than ICE ever was, but it’s being designed to be a full FX solution first. The plan is fluids, than fire and smoke, than destruction and when this is done, they’ll consider cloth, muscles, etc. ICE already did all that, so I’m guessing we’ll have at least 3+ years until BiFrost is finished, but I might be wrong.
The other thing that got my attention is that AD is thinking of only Maya as an authoring host for BiFrost work. 3ds Max and other software are only mentioned as players of the compound level. Same like Houdini Engine … 3ds Max will have a Maya Engine to work with the assets. So, why wait for BiFrost when Houdini Engine is almost here already? And second, Maya already has a full dynamics/fluids/cloth/particles integrated solution, the Nucleus thing. Now, they’ll get another and Max don’t have one yet.
Other than that, it was a very good presentation, the fluids do look interesting.
not for max…not in the extension for max..
boo
Another thing that caught my attention. At the animation vision series, they talk a lot about animation in Maya. That’s okay, because Maya is the standard of animation in the industry, but … they say that the major one concern from the clients is performance. So they are studying/thinking/doing of multithreading Maya entirely. Not only that, he talks about improving the UI design and interface of Maya to better suite the artist. There’s even a picture of new icons and stuff (probably just a prototype, but it looked more improved).
All great things, but that made me jealous in the sense we never hear anything about this kind of stuff for Max. Only the “we can’t talk about” but for Maya they are talking about it.
Anyway, I’m learning Maya. 😀
Clearly all goodness in the last extension aside, it is still clear Max is not getting the film/vfx love.
My only consolation is that Houdini Indie has nice particles/fluids.
Video was nice however as stated, they are many years away from bifrost being a complete solution including for full physics simulations and other asset modification (ice like). In a nutshell it’s 3 steps behind Houdini and if you strip the fluids then Thinking particles runs laps around it. Current implementations of fluids is also far less complete than what houdini or Realflow and likely Phoenix FD in most aspects; even blender has relatively decent implementation for “dropping strawberries”.
In other words by time Bifrost actually matures, I hope it will be ported to max as well because “we killed XSI so max and maya could live” – prove it. Until then it’s just another expensive toy acquired by ADSK that was added on top of otherwise stagnant core.
I don’t agree with this. Naiad is still one of the fastest, most stable and customizable fluid software out there and the reason a lot of Houdini users even used it. And Bifrost already has fire/smoke, just like Naiad does. It runs laps around both PhoenixFD and FumeFX when it comes to control (though that’s somewhat alleviated by Stoke 2.0) and the type of adaptive grid where it lowers the voxel spacing around the important objects in the simulation that was demonstrated I don’t believe any other fluid software has. Did you see the speed at which they simulated and had foam in the viewport? That was seriously impressive. Since it’s the same underlying framework that runs the smoke/fire, it will benefit these features as well.
As for complexity that someone else was concerned about, they already have a very deep level of control in their node system. They have simplified a lot of their nodes, but you can go into them to an even deeper level than you even could in Naiad to the point where you see a lot of the math that actually makes up the node. These are also customizable.
As for destruction, I am not even worried about that since we have great tools available already but it will be nice to have it all in one framework, like Houdini. I believe Bifrost as it is in development right now is far ahead of what’s been released in Houdini when it comes to fluids (including smoke/fire). And if the same level of innovation is applied to destruction that they have done with Bifrost and Naiad before that, I feel we are going to see something special when it does come out. These are extremely forward thinking and smart developers.
My only concern is the pace at which they are releasing these tools. Naiad was obviously in a great place when it was being developed with frequent releases but since then there’s very little of all these cool things, even Naiad level, present in the purchasable version of Maya. If they get on top of that, I see Bifrost having a huge impact on the off the shelf industry.
I agree with you Tobbe, but at the same time, it’s my major concern. When you see anything about BiFrost, you never hear anything about Max. I mean … in the state of BiFrost, Max would take a lot of advantage to it, wouldn’t it?
Eddie said that they would wait until BiFrost was solid to start porting it to Max, but that would take a long time. The way it seems right now is … if you want to have incredible tools for FX, go to Maya. I think it’s just a matter of time before the plugins we love are in Maya as well.
“Eddie said that they would wait until BiFrost was solid to start porting it to Max”
Please kindly point me to the source of that, I don’t remember him ever talking about ‘porting it to Max’.
“if you want to have incredible tools for FX, go to Maya”
And leave PFlow, ThinkingParticles and RayFire behind? why? so I can have access to Bifrost? So to play into the hands of Autodesk? no thanks, Realflow is looking really good right now and FXGear’s Flux is around the corner and in the end If I was forced to choose an alternative to Max for FX why would I ever wanna go with Maya? you are aware that there’s a tool called Houdini out there, right?
He didn’t said it specifically, but I thought it was implied on what he was saying. He said this during that post about a NYC User group.
“Third, Bifrost. As I pointed out, I recognize a fluid solution to be important to numerous different kinds of 3ds Max user. From a Civil Engineer showing water flows in low lying areas or Architectural Designers designing water features to film and vfx work. I did not ask whether 3ds Max users need fluids but rather‘In its current state, does BiFrost represent that solution?’ I think it’s a fair question. BiFrost represents a considerable effort of integration. If it provides value, it’s worth that investment.”
As for Houdini … it’s amazing for sure and I’m trying to learn it. But the tools you said to leave behind, if you go to the Maya User Request, a system like PFlow is one of the top requests. RayFire will come to Maya, but keep in mind that DMM (IMO) is very very powerful. And maybe tP as well? I don’t know … but if you saw the talks, they are working on lots of things in Maya, including improving lots of performance, rethinking the UI and workflows, etc. I just would like to hear that Max is looked this way also. Say what you will, but PFlow is still monothreaded and if you used ICE, you know what a multithreaded dynamics solution can do better. And let’s face it, overall, Max is the slowest of the bunch (speed of the program). We have lags to open stuff for the first time, the slate material manager re-renders almost every time the icons and the program takes forever to open. It feels heavy.
I think the point here is that all Max users want Max better. It’s a start, but we need more, don’t we?
Cheers.
I agree but I’ve sort of given up on the interface being put into Max. I’ll use Maya for fluids once Bifrost has released even what they had at the Naiad stage. They haven’t upgraded the price of Maya for Bifrost so it’s the same as it would have buying a license of Naiad — an aspect I was concerned about.
If I really need to do destruction that properly interacts with fluids, I’ll go with Houdini but I’ll deal with that once I am asked to do something like that which will hopefully not be for a while as I really want to show my creative side rather than my technical side as much as possible here on forward.
Thank you Tobbe for sharing your input and educating me on several aspects. I come from commercial/cinematics background and fluid simulation has to be extremely flexible, so when they are just about to introduce basic aspects like surface tension then it’s clear for me that there are CURRENTLY more complete solutions on the market for these specific needs( we use RF, Houdini). You also mention it’s capabilities vs FumeFX, but let’s be honest FumeFX is beyond amazing and will fulfill all production criteria for most of us.
Mind you, I have not had the chance to work with Bifrost yet; DAG->JIT and overall speed of the system is of course impressive. However in a sentiment shared with others – it feels bad to be neglected by ADSK for many years (as max user), painful to completely switch studio pipeline for maya (unefficient for most tasks our small studio faces/ also giving up all the tools) and frankly i do not trust adsk enough to license both softwares just to fulfill one objective (that also bloats pipeline). History has shown that the updates and future are unpredictable with all ADSK apps. ICE also showed great potential until they just pulled the plug. Maya at its core has not changed much for past 5-6 years prior to these updates- they hibernate and save money and then wake up one day with a new acquisition that keeps users happy while everything else is still stagnated. That is why i am skeptical and have chosen to keep 1 foot outside of adsk boat, being confident in houdini or a small set of plugins by much appreciated max plugin devs! Their goal always is to make incredibly refined solutions that excel at specific tasks while AD will make money with subscription regardless of what they add to max/maya 2016. This is my personal subjective view and i was grateful to read yours! Tnx
Luckily Thinkbox is around to give Max the most kickass tools.
http://youtu.be/Rbv7tVwxgEg
Yes…if only AUTODESK was around to give Max those kickass tools