Bifrost Beta

[Bullit]

Eloi Andaluz is what you can call a 3Ds Max evangelist, so he keeps promoting it and have some access to Autodesk. Now the context of current situation: the last release of 3Ds Max was so thin in features that Autodesk had to promote a sort of roadmap for 3Ds Max to fill in the desert. Regardless the user base returned so much scorn. Now Andaluz come with a new video now with future developments. Then he spends 1/3 of the video with Softimage videos of ICE telling - or reashing what we have been told a long time ago - that Bifrost now will be like ICE and a standalone application.

[Mathaeus]

From what I've heard, re-sellers are calling Mayans these days with story, something like ''please stay with subscription, version 2020 is coming soon, with Bifrost'". On opposite side, similar rumors are circulating around for a long time. Hard to know, is it a real signal or just an echo of some old event in corporation. Perhaps we will know more, this summer.

[luceric]

This is what the blog on The Area actually says:

We are exploring building procedural environment layout capabilities based on Bifröst to provide out of the box workflows (Bifrost is our procedural engine used in 3ds Max and Maya)

this just means they are thinking about making a scatter tool that's easy to use ("out of the box").

[owei]

Much blabla..they are talking about Bifrost for years and years..XSI is "dead" since half a decade now...better software faster, they claimed..lol. sure Take Houdini for stuff like that and don´t waste time on AD

[Mathaeus]

Definitively there is stronger activity around Maya and Max in these months, while is not clear what's exactly happening. New expansion, or, they are leaving the planet Second sounds nice, btw.

[Bullit]

For Max that is related to TyFlow.

[Bullit]

Sneak Peek: Creating Serious FX with Bifrost in Maya

TUESDAY, APRIL 30 at 1:00 PM | WEDNESDAY, MAY 1 at 10:00 AM | THURSDAY, MAY 2 at 10:00 AM | FRIDAY, MAY 3 at 11:00 AM
Marcus Nordenstam (Autodesk)

Autodesk's Marcus Nordenstam will show you how the procedural content-creation framework Bifrost has evolved to enable Maya users to do serious FX in Maya. Bifrost makes this possible by harnessing easy-to-use, cutting-edge dynamics solvers, built atop a visual programming core. Don't miss this peek behind the curtain! Attendees will be given the chance to join the current Bifrost beta.

https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/thebuzz/fmx-2019/

[Hirazi Blue]

easy-to-use, cutting-edge dynamics solvers, built atop a visual programming core

Really? Does indeed sound familiar...

[Bullit]

Yep, btw i changed the topic title , but it did not update in main forum view.

[rray]

I see an updated title ("Bifrost Beta")

[Rork]

Meh.... Too little too late...

Just jump onto the Houdini Indy bandwagon, or just get Blender and use a couple of months of AD subscription worth to get all the addons you'll ever need

[Hirazi Blue]

I see an updated title ("Bifrost Beta")

Me too! Probably was a glitch... Now the title shows up above the thread, on the index page and on the active topics page...

BTW Looks like AD once again tries to sell something "old" as a "huge innovation"...

[Draise]

It does sound like an old concept as "huge innovation" - and about damn time. I guess their resulting magic bullet to sell this will ultimately have to be good presets and node-trees with great optimization, like.. playback/calculation speeds.

[luceric]

I'm not sure if I see much resemblance between ICE and Bifrost. ICE is really about the Softimage underneath; accessing point collections, point locators, mesh attributes. It exposes the Softimage architecture. Then you could theoretically get more advanced nodes that do complex things.t. Bifrost is a code generator (it parses the graph and generates binary executable with LLVM) with a graph UI, that starts by exposing the components of really advanced fluid and simulation things, and will eventually become more generalized as simpler nodes are added. It reminds me more of when Softimage took the big softimage shaders and broke them down to pieces to make the libraries of shaders for the render tree.

[rray]

Thanks for the insight luceric. So there won't be any interactive feedback when chaning param values etc.? I'm not sure yet how Bifrost fits in a bigger picture.

[luceric]

no, no, you connect the graph and change values, and in the background it's running a just-in-time compiler in a separate thread to compile and update the graph. Just like a GPU shader graph that generates code and compiles it.