Effective TDs has announced Storm, a new standalone granular simulation tool by Sebastian Schäfer, with the ability to import and export to all major DCC apps.
Storm is capable of importing geometry in .obj, .SD, or .abc formats for deforming emitters and defectors, and simulations can be exported to .prt, .bin. or .abc formats for compatibility with a wide range of applications.
The application’s modern architecture is fully multithreaded and has an accelerated viewport display to preview millions of particles in real-time.
Controls include the ability to manipulate stiffness, constraint forces and much more to make it easy to simulate a wide variety of materials, from sand to jelly, with ease. According to Effective TDs this is just the beginning, there are plans to evolve Storm to a full multsolver framework.
So if you wanted to get these into Max – the options for .prt are?
Frost (might be a bit heavy for it?)
Krakatoa
PhoenixFD?
Heavy for frost? I deal with over 40M particles in frost no problem.
I will say right now in max, krakatoa/magmaflow/frost is the most complete solution, for flexibility, data management, heavy instancing.
You can as well bring the prt in to pflow and then you can use vrayInstancer, or you can use the new forest pack to instance and render with vray or arnold for example.
Most examples on the video are rendered in 3dsmax. Some are frost, others are bringing the sim in pflow, some rendered with vray, arnold and redshift. The spinning wheel was rendered in houdini.
Sounds like there are number of options that could work and I’d like to sort through them to see which is the best for me, unfortunately, the demo version does not allow export. But it looks like a fantastic product that can be useful for work I’m working on now and well worth the risk of going all in.
It would definitely be an idea to have a limited export version – say 200 frames or something?
We get different requests like this, and we totally understand that people want to try how integrate on their 3d software, we are working on an alternative way to demo the software.
I second that..i would love to have an export limited option to see how effective the export works…i do have one more request though..and that would be to have the option of using 3dsmax like navigation..not just maya.
We are still working on the next update. Also checking if we can do the changes in time for the demo version. Meanwhile on our webpage we included Storm outputs in .prt .bin and .abc for people to test.
About 3dsmax navigation, will be sweet, Im a 3dsmax user and I get used very fast, but yeah, on the list!
I’ll have to give it a try then – sure I messed around with PRT export from PhoenixFD and it didn’t seem to be that great as a workflow. (Plus as mentioned elsewhere the lag of recompiles for 2019)
I don’t have Krakatoa, guessing the PRT loader into Pflow is part of that? Used to be able to use the trial version (think Bobo even suggested it) but Thinkbox tend to squirrel stuff away these days so not sure if that’s allowed or not.
i believe you can use the kraktoa install without a license to get to the prt loader.
We support so far PRT and BIN. Both loaders are totally Free. Install Krakatoa demo, you get acces to load and save PRTfiles. Add magmaflow to modify data, or import them in to PFlow. BIN file comes from Realflow, also the loader is free.
We will support as well alembic, we will launch an update in the following weeks, just making sure it import/export to most apps.
If you do a tutorial with the proper workflow to use it with Blender, you could get some users from Blender, so far Molecular is not a fast solution, is good, but not awesome, and your soft seems pretty cool and at a proper price poin.
So far you can investigate how to import results with Alembic 🙂
Congrats Eloi, it seems a cool package 🙂
Thanks Juang! maybe we can do a tutorial together! Do you have options in blender to mesh/instance over particles? We are exploring as well a way to export already the alembic with some basic geo.
I would be a pleasure! 🙂
In Blender we can import particles using alembic, but I think it´s an special workflow for the time being, with the fracture modifier branch we have the option to mesh it correctly (like in real flow) and with Blender vanilla we can instance objects there.
The only thing that can´t be done as far as I know, and I´m working to try to convince some dev to implement it, is a particle skinner for meshes hehe, but so far I had no time to explain the power of it, but up to some extent it may be possible to do in the Fracture Modifier branch, wich will be integrated in Master or 2.8 branches soon, I´m not sure in wich one.
Cheers!
i´ve tried and it looks really awesome. Could be this better than realflow´s granular solver in any aspect?
cheers