Softimage Explosia FX released!

[ActionArt]

Nevermind, just couldn't find the cache files but now it's working

[FXDude]

Cool, and feel free to show us any test material!

I wonder if Animating the speed & rate and such going up and down in an instant using the "from particles" could make convincing explosions.. humm...

[FXDude]

While many on the mailing list requested interoperability with Redshift,
I personally would like to see some love for 3delight/renderman compliant renderers as well...
;;)

Well last time I've tried, before year or so, still it was a practically impossible to match Mental Ray, using 3delight's volumes. Wasn't even close, when it comes to speed, quality, memory consumption... Don't believe anything changed to this day. Rendering of millions of points instead of voxels, that might work, but that's probably sufficient for light smokes, nothing else.
As an rule of thumb, Renderman + easy an fast volume rendering = kind of oxymoron. Or, looking from flip side - volumes are only aspect of MR, which, very personally, I'm still keeping in good memory.

Not sure about that... don't know how VDB's produced by ExplosiaFX are universal, or how faithfully 3Delight interprets VDB's
but this seems encouraging in at least one aspect..

(VDB's produced in Houdini rendered in 3Delight for 3dsMax)


Perhaps would be worth giving it a go and see.

[Mathaeus]

don't know how VDB's produced by ExplosiaFX are universal, or how faithfully 3Delight interprets VDB's
but this seems encouraging in at least one aspect..

(VDB's produced in Houdini rendered in 3Delight for 3dsMax)

Yeah now someone have to use Houdini, Max and 3delight for Max.

Very personally, I'd be looking for one, or both, of two:
1: Obvious advantage of specific technology, or specific design decision.
2: Refinement, coming with something widely, long time used, or with built in renderers.

For 1, I'll be interested what RedShift or Octane have to say. Sow some very impressive Octane volume renders. Together with 3d motion blur, full GI, what else not. When it comes to complete Renderman story, my mind stays around REYES, which was great for primary rays over diced geometry, and that's it. Volume render simply doesn't fit nicely, there. Their new ray tracing solutions are new for them, but not new for rest of world.
For 2, never sow such level of refinement, like work of mr.Schönberger, or some plugins for Max - despite the all 'love' to bad old MR, or, antique Max's defaut scanline renderer. When it comes to Renderman compliant, there's little problem, once they were jumped into ray tracing field, complete book of rules and habits had to be written again - but it wasn't, imho.

Back to topic, I think it's better for plugin, to do a proper job with smaller number of renderers, instead of wasting a time to support everything around.

[FXDude]

Perhaps indeed,
Yet I know that Since pathtracing was introduced 2013(?), did it quickly become the default method.

But BTW, would you know it there are trade-offs with path tracing for some of it's traditional benefits?

And perhaps as you say did volumes improve in the same go?

Cheers,

[CYTE]

Hi Oleg,
thank you so much for this wonderful plugin!
it seems to be very powerful!
xsi will never die

[danyargici]

Oleg, firstly congratulations, this looks fantastic.

However it baffles me why you haven't posted this over at the CGTalk News forum. You would get maximum exposure over there.

[Mathaeus]

Perhaps indeed,

But BTW, would you know it there are trade-offs with path tracing for some of it's traditional benefits?

And perhaps as you say did volumes improve in the same go?

Perhaps not for traditional usage, like clouds and smokes, but there are other aspects, where power of GPU renderers could allow more (when I mentioned Red Shift or Octane, I was thinking about GPU, not only path - tracing) - for example, high density volumes for getting a look of short, high dense fur or wool.
Method was already popular in renderers related to Lightwave, including Modo renderer, also sow nice examples in Houdini Mantra, too. After all, as far as I remember, it was Softimage 3 or so, having a volume rendering of hairs - perhaps too ambitious for 2003, but, today, maybe not, for some of new, strong GPU players.

[Hirazi Blue]

However it baffles me why you haven't posted this over at the CGTalk News forum. You would get maximum exposure over there.

Maximum exposure in this case would probably not necessarily lead to more sales. As he posted this on the Mailing List and the si-community he will probably have reached by far most of his potential customers. Sad but true. A possible Fabric version in the future would be different story altogether obviously.

[FXDude]

I hardly think 'leading to many sales' has been the point of releasing anything for soft (to an extent even traditionally)

without such developments being exactly 'for nothing' either.

While being confident that at least more than just a few will find value in quite possibly the quickest, and also possibly most versatile (comprehensive & non-black-boxed playing well with regular ICE nodes, ICE itself being particularly comprehensive) node-based voxel fluid simulator around.

[Hirazi Blue]

CGChannel has picked up on it now: Blackcore releases ExplosiaFX for Softimage

[FXDude]

I still find that to be good news despite everything

[Bullit]

I agree FXDude

[xeraphine]

Hello, having problem with explosiaFx, am following the instructions about shaders path, but the arnoldExplosiaFx.dll does not load. What i´m missing. Thanks

[Rork]

9 out of 10 times it's some kind of dll dependency. Get 'dependency walker' and see if the plugin is missing some kind of MS VC++ redist pack or something.

rob

[Mr.Core]

Can you copy-paste what you get in the history when render with arnold shaders ? Basically neither ArnoldExploisaFX nor qt stuff should not even appear in the plugin manager because it does not have any of softimage plugin callbacks.
I already have implemented my own network subsystem for both win and linux and will remove these qt libs in the next update soon (alongside with linux build)