Particle tests (water, clouds, etc)

[Jonathan]

Just curious how "realistic" people have gotten with Vanilla Max?

I recently installed Blender 2.5 and will be trying out their water simulation tools, but would love to do it all within Max, or as much as possible.
I am just impressed with some of the recent Blender updates, and the fact that it is free is a huge plus. For example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AiLyQWX ... re=related
(here's just a quick test with Blobmesh, one of my main problems with it is that it's too slow and only uses one core of the CPU )


Thanks for your time.

[Jonathan]

Was just thinking about if you just use a particle system, throw a bunch of particles together, use motion blur, and the composite reflection on top of the particles, it might yield a partially water look to it. (this test is just with 10,000 particles / frame)

[ivanisavich]

Yep, that's what I've done in the past. No point in spending lots of time doing fluid sims if you can fake the look using pflow

[Jonathan]

Here's another one. Needs more blur, less tention/more variation, and smaller particles. It takes a while to render though.

[Jonathan]

Also am going through Jussing's cloud tutorial. Basically making clouds in Max w/o any plugins.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=553628
(or, http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/3ds_ ... stance_bas)
Here's an early result. In the animated GIF, the camera is just moving some to the left. Currently checking for artifacts. Next comes some more gradiant work to give the clouds more volume.

Next I'm going to try to use a large particle system and generate some clouds using it with this approach. Any initial suggestions/warning for setting up such a system?

[JayG]

Keep 'em coming! This is cool stuff, makes me want to try my hand at it a bit...

[Jonathan]

Testing a "light" rig I setup, as this approach requires controlled lighting a good bit. Just some linked stuff to a dummy/null object.

[hype]

This is great stuff Jonathan! The flow of some of your particles is really nice, very fluid like. Great work!

I'm sure you're aware of Pete Draper's great books, all about doing natural elements without plug-ins inside of Max.

http://www.xenomorphic.co.uk/publications.htm

If you don't know about yet, you should definitely check out Volumes 2 & 3. (Volume 1 is the same as Volume 2, except Vol 2 has some added things)

I've gone through times when I really tried to do cool liquids and stuff, but I mostly used Glu3d. It's kind of expensive, but I've always only ever used the demo version (FREE). The demo version is fully functional, but puts a small logo in the upper right corner. If it was my own goofing around, I didn't care, but if I was rendering something to be used somewhere, I would render a version with the liquid turned on (with the logo up in the corner), and then I would turn Glu off in the scene and render it again, and with Glu turned off, it wouldn't render the logo. Then I would just patch that corner in with masks inside After Effects afterwards. I still do this, works great.

http://3daliens.com/joomla/

Sometimes when using just Pwrapper with Max particles, the logo would render right in the middle of the frame. That's much harder to work around, but again, if it was just a fun test for me, I didn't care. (Pwrapper is the Blobmesh thing that comes with Glu3d, but they also offer it as a stand alone plug-in for turning regular particles into a mesh surface. It's just like Blobmesh, and really fast and with much more control!)

Here's the kinds of tests I used to mess around with.
These all used Glu3d
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/Glu_water_sean.mov
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/glu_in_cup_01.mov
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/Glu3D_test_04-1.mov
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/table_overturn.mov
These did not, just Max.
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/heart_axe.mov
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/rain_Draper.mov
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/boat_wake.mov
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/cloud_flythrough.mov
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/water/water_shader_01.mov

Looking forward to see what else you keep coming up with!!

[Jonathan]

Cool Hype. That walking human/water thing is quite cool.

Thanks for the info, links, and examples. I've been going over some Allan McKay's tutorials (http://vfxsolution.com/allanmckay/train ... tutorials/) and there's a lot of cool stuff.

[Jonathan]

More particle testing.

Used a few particle systems for the stars. Had an RGB texture with varying values which were used to scatter the stars on an object which is not renderable. However, in the end there were too many stars, so I reduced the number by a lot, so they're not noticeable that much, doh. The small chunks of rock were supposed to be rotating as they find their target, but something went wrong, doh!

It has issues, but it was a fun learning experience apart from just regular real-time rendering/rasterization work that I do at work.

The earth was "glowing" at one time (via Max render effects, which I know isn't the ideal way to do it), but turned it off later due to artifacts and didn't comp any in for it.

[Jonathan]

Another test with procedural ground deformation via particles with a simple bone, IK-system (I remembered Tyson's stretchy IK bone script after making the simple animation). Based on Allan Mckay's procedural footprint training video and misc. tests.

[ErikE]

Nice, that slug one is pretty cool

[Jonathan]

Some tests with Blender. Now working on a quick workflow between Blender and Max,

[Jonathan]

Some more Blender 2.5 stuff. 2.5 is the alpha release, so it's a little buggy and some things aren't working yet, but the fluid sim is nice, and the GUI updates are great, so I'm just patiently waiting for the beta and then final releases. Rendering caustics is an issue, as some of the free renderers don't support 2.5 yet, so there are no caustics to this water.

[hype]

Wow, great stuff Jonathan!

[Cameron]

Yeah those water sims are looking sweet.

Just curious about those little blobs of water that just shoot ahead of the rest though, I wonder what's causing that.

[Richard]

yea that's looking sweet indeed!

what kind of workflow between max and blender are you trying to setup?

[Jonathan]

I think some of the "blobs" running ahead of the rest is due partially to me running those tests at a scale too small for the correct look intended. However, the 2.5 version of Blender is a bit buggy, so not all of the features are fully functional, and importing things have been problematic, so I may move to a 2.49, unless the updates to 2.5 come soon.

As for the Blender to Max workflow, I suppose there are multiple things I could do in Max with Particle Flow, render-to-texture, and other things that I cannot due in Blender due to some things not working (yet) or just not there. However, Blender is very promising.

[Intars5d]

This Blender fluid indeed looks sweet, that's for sure

[Jonathan]

Working on some scripts to automate some various things, one of them is a chain. Here's some tests I was doing with the chains created by the sript and Reactor rope modifer in a Rope collection.

Reactor Rope physics (really quick to sim!)


Reactor Concave rigid body simulation takes for ever even on a small chain
And here's another example, but this one had issues with linear/sRGB workflow issues, so the chain looks a bit too dark.