Baked down to boneanimation in FBX you have to keep in mind that most engines have a limit of number of bones per actor. UE4 for instance has a max cap of 256 meaning you would never be able to have more parts in your sim than 256. On weaker platforms, even fewer. The bone transforms would also run on the CPU, acting as a bottleneck.
Whereas with vertex shaders you can have as many parts as you want, as long as you can afford the texture memory for it. It also stays on the GPU which is a lot faster.
Thanks Partikel! Glad to have such a clear-cut answer on this Is the general rule of thumb in VFX to try and use the GPU as much as possible unless your emitter requires a CPU emitter? Any reason why you shouldn’t?
Today I tried my hand at making a blood effect before lunch, ended up taking a fair bit longer though
Most of the logic and timing wasn’t too bad, but I really struggled with the initial “blood blast” when the bullet exits the head. I ended up using a texture with and bunch of thin strokes and small droplets, as well as a supporting “mist” of blood at the start. Not a 100% on this, any pointers?
Did some more work on my RBD destruction, added a fuel tank explosion and poked around some more in Houdinis RBD simulations to understand how I could better control my destruction. I had a lot of “Ah-ha!” moments on this which was really cool - For example, using a boolean operation to create a shape in my wooden plank for destruction:
Is the general rule of thumb in VFX to try and use the GPU as much as possible unless your emitter requires a CPU emitter? Any reason why you shouldn’t?
