TyFlow 2.0 released with fluid solver for smoke and fire sims

Tyson Ibele has released tyFlow 2.0 which introduces Zenith, a GPU-based sparse fluid solver designed for smoke and fire simulation.

The new solver runs entirely on the GPU and is designed for large-scale simulations. According to Ibele, systems with a 24GB GPU can handle simulation domains containing billions of voxels. Fluid emission can be controlled through particle data, surface attributes, texture maps, or expressions. Fluid motion can be influenced by forces, vorticity, and advection.

Zenith is integrated with the Nitrous viewport in 3ds Max and includes a ray marching engine that allows smoke and fire simulations to be previewed directly in the viewport. The preview supports heat glow, motion blur, temperature blur, and ambient occlusion, with renders refining progressively.

The Zenith tools were developed by Svetlin Nikolov, a former team lead for the Phoenix fluid solver at Chaos. Ibele said the solver was created through Nikolov’s development work after earlier statements that tyFlow would not include a dedicated fluid solver.

The release also includes CUDA-based machine learning models intended to increase resolution and detail in fluid simulations. A voxel interpolation system is included for retiming simulation data. Zenith simulation data can be accessed through a custom API intended for integration with renderers or plug-ins.

The fluid simulation operators are even available in the free edition of tyFlow. Full file import and export features require the Pro version.  According to Tyson an API is available for rendering directly from TyFlow and has been send to major render developers, until then rendering is supported by exporting the results to VDBs.

tyFlow 2.0 also introduces new operators and modifiers. Updates include SDF shape mode for the PhysX Shape and PhysX Collision operators to improve concave collision handling. In addition there are new operators such as Global and MAXScript, a tyMeshBlend modifier for blending normals where meshes intersect, and updates to the tyCache modifier that add spline caching and support for subframe motion blur data. The software updates its OpenVDB integration to version 13 and raises the minimum supported CUDA version to 12.8.

More information is available on the tyFlow website.

Tutorial on the new features by Eloi Andaluz Fullà.