Fluid Sims and the Future of VFX

General Discussion
#22

been pushing for realtime afterburn for a while… we’ll see. on one level im dissapointed how well baked flipbooks get the job done. incredibly inexpensive and the human eye doesn’t seem to care too much that the lighting makes no sense. which makes me sad.

I’d made some progress making these “volume boxes”, need to revisit it. ended up failing at inversing the transform for the raycast so that you could spin, stretch, and scale it just like normal particles. need to revisit that.

what you’ve got to ask yourself if your looking ahead is whats going to make significant bounds next gen. bandwidth or alu? My hunch is abusing the texture bandwidth is going to make the most sense. We’ll be flush with memory on the card. So baking as much as you can is going to probably be possible as 8k everything will seem normal. I’m trying to look into a way of baking better imposters. But if ALU somehow makes great leaps and you can start doing all these 3d noises efficiently then raycasting through them is perfect as it doesn’t need to call a single texture, which just like auto stalls the gpu.

personally the next 3 years seem more about honing the artistic craft using the current gen set of techniques, as the hardware is fixed, and most people are dev-ing atleast partially for consoles.

the excitement of new hardware was super cool though! Soon it’ll be back!

4 Likes
#23

Yea, we’re in dire need of pipeline improvements.

1 Like
#24

That’s my warhorse right there.

Actually, I’d like to ask our community about this… Let me make another thread, to not derail this one.

#25

Thats sums up pretty much, I am of the view that technological advancement is made for human to use by human. I see games as different medium from films no matter how realistic you go. For games, I see a kind of blend of both where the artist’s creative flair is there as well as he can have the best use of the technology to create the desired effects needed for a product, It really depends upon which game requires what kind of effects, So I don’t see two different themes in games should present similarity in their effects.

#26

I’ve been working hard to get a wonderful real-time fluid editing tool out to fellow VFX Artists. I firmly believe we have the hardware for it now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8sRhjOqVd0

Currently all it does is create an emitter where you click, but soon it’ll be a full on editor that can render out sprite sheets. And perhaps maybe even export a vertex animation cache, who knows where my team and I will take it! :slight_smile:

We have rendering issues to sort out but they’ll be fixed in time.

Who knows, maybe something just like this could be implemented in UE4. I’m excited to see where technology takes us.

10 Likes
#27

That’s pretty much this:
http://users.skynet.be/fquake/
Is this you by any chance?
(With some tweaks in the right direction shading wise).

It would be nice to have it more author-able than using click to spawn, like the ability to create some spawn areas animate their spawn amounts.

2 Likes
#28

Not me, but an acquaintance of mine, Jan Vlietinck. :slight_smile:

Quite some time ago I got permission from him to use the basis of his code. I modified it fairly extensively to make it more optimized and updated the standards to c++11. It was mainly used as a testing grounds for displaying new shaders. When we finish our vector field software, we’ll take what we learned from his and our work, and create something similar with Vulkan instead of DX11. We’ve been working on our Rendering Engine to show vector fields and fluid sims.

When we get it into our new engine, it’ll have plenty of authoring controls + methods to spawn emitters. :gift:

2 Likes
#29

I’m just reading this post now, but just wanted to echo some previous replies. Especially since I’m strongly in favor and want to help push/utilize the technology for using real time simulations. :slight_smile:

I agree it’s another tool that can be added to the kit. But further than that, I don’t see it as just stylized vs “realistic” when it comes to billboards vs simulations. Most simulations we see are based on real physics (or at least faked to mimic), but that doesn’t mean they need to be. The math and parameters can be tweaked to achieve something else, something stylized. I think we see what we see now because we’re trying to break into a new technology. I would relate it to everything being super shiny chrome when rendering 3d models first became a thing, because it was, “Hey, look what we can do now!”.

Compared to your comments on explosions looking too “buttery”, I have a problem with a destruction I see in a lot of movies. Everything that gets destroyed, whether it’s a building, a cliff side, a spaceship, etc looks like it’s made of sand and just crumbles apart. These problems aren’t necessarily the technology behind them as much as they are the artist/art director who made them. The way an effect is “supposed” to look is subjective. Michael Bay’s movies are not made the way they are on accident.

I work closely with a graphics programmer who can create a lot of cool systems. Particle systems, etc, I had available weren’t doing the job I needed, so I had him create a custom system with parameters I defined for control. When he handed it over to me, I tweaked those parameters (added some tiny custom behavior of my own), and created something. When he saw it he was amazed with how it looked, claiming he could never do that. I was actually amazed thinking, “You created the system, and understand the math behind the parameters in place, I just tweaked those parameters.” So basically, long story short, these things will always need an artist’s touch to get the right look.

Besides that, as the technology we use to consume entertainment advances, so does the source material behind it. For example, on a TV or monitor a composited explosion might look fine (in certain circumstances) but it starts to fall apart in VR (in many more circumstances).

Sorry for the long post, but something I’m passionate about. (::quiet chant:: down with billboards, down with billboards…) j/k j/k :smile:

#30

being able to just sketch the fire or smoke shape we want would be AWESOME

2 Likes
#31

Yeah +1 for the sketch thing ! sketching the motion or shape you want your effect to be would be awesome, also for drawing paths for stuff ejecting off an explosion, things like that…
been thinking on and off about this since seeing that video from speedtree a while back :slight_smile:

1 Like
#33

Impressive! :+1: Its looks like a heat field of some kind but still one of the best smoke ive seen in games