SlipstreamVX: An unbounded realtime smoke simulator/renderer

[bhouston]

Fluid simulation specialists Exocortex Technologies, in collaboration with Thiago Costa of Lagoa Technologies, today announces the public release of the innovative "SlipstreamVX" smoke, air and fire simulator for Autodesk Softimage 2010 and 2011.



SlipstreamVX introduces a new method of simulating fluids to the VFX artist community. Rather than employing a voxel simulation method that uniformly divides up space whether or not anything interesting is happening, the patent pending SlipstreamVX focuses on the interesting aspects of the fluid, the turbulence, wherever it is and it represents in explicitly.

This innovative approach to fluid simulation gives SlipstreamVX two unique and powerful benefits:

First, SlipstreamVX does not limit its fluid simulations to any type of bounding box. Fluid simulations are free to go where they want. You can have detail where you want it. You can have multiple centers of details and interaction between originally disparate areas of interest with ease. SlipstreamVX efficient representation of turbulence means that you don't run out of memory.

Second, SlipstreamVX can simulate the complex and detailed fluid dynamics of smoke and fire in real-time and near-real-time. Voxels are not only memory consuming but they are slow. SlipstreamVX explicit turbulence representation is simply much more efficient. Having a real-time simulation makes it easier for an artist to refine a simulation's look and feel.

As demonstrated on the exhibit floor of SIGGRAPH 2010, SlipstreamVX is fully multithreaded to take advantage of Intel's Xeon and Core i7 CPUs. SlipstreamVX along with Intel's technology increases the speed of simulation creation and iteration beyond artists current expectations.

Lastly, SlipstreamVX is being distributed with Exocortex's new GPU-accelerated "Fury" renderer. Fury was designed to compliment SlipstreamVX's near-real-time simulation with real-time rendering of simulation-centric atmospheric effects. The rapidly evolving Fury renderer already supports depth of field, motion blur, a density integrator and matte objects.

The SlipstreamVX simulation and Fury renderer bundle along with support for the first year is available now for $399.99 CND. A time limited trial version of SlipstreamVX and Fury is available from the Exocortex website:

http://www.exocortex.com/simulation/slipstreamvx

More videos:






Thiago Costa's getting started tutorial:

[Akurra]

Looks really great. Would be even better when the self shadowing feature is available.
Would it be possible to achieve FumeFX quality/functionality with it?
Like on the following examples:
http://vimeo.com/5367780
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EAO6hM6ImE

Piotr

Moderator edit: considering your low post count, I'll say this only once: use the URL tags - HB ;)

[redmotion]

Is FumeFX realtime in the viewport? Never used it.

[Akurra]

It isn't very fast, but it allows quite easily to produce v good. results.
Slipstream realtime option looks very nice in this matter.

[bhouston]

Looks really great. Would be even better when the self shadowing feature is available.
Would it be possible to achieve FumeFX quality/functionality with it?

In all honesty, I think that FumeFX has better fire simulation quality than SlipstreamVX has at the moment. But I think the smoke quality can be equivalent. Self-shadowing should appear in the next little while. We have an experimental self-shadowing mode implemented in the current version, but it isn't really ready for production work.

[rconover]

I for one would *love* a non-realtime rendering solution (so hi-quality - no compremise) for rendering smoke and especialy fire with 3delight that gets any where near this ballpark (fumefx again-but awsome examples of it).
http://vz2.blur.com/work/detail/dantes-inferno#movies/1
(sorry you'll have to wait for the 'inferno' part but its a beutiful ride).
Realtime is great-but it doesn't answer every need. I want photo-real.
Along with a perfect match for renderman displacement and motion blur.

(Moderator edit - Newcomer alert: please use the URL tags - HB)

[calmasacow]

Looks very cool but also of note it is limited to MR only. Ben, working with Thiago I'm hoping that you had at least some exposure to Arnold beta. I hope that what ever you come up with you will make it Arnold compatible or at least join the Beta board and supply Arnold versions of the shaders for rendering. However at this point we need something that is self shadowing. Hopefully this thing can become Arnold compatible and produce results that are as good as fumeFX if so we will buy for sure.

[CiaranM]

Looks very cool but also of note it is limited to MR only.

Slipstream isn't limited to MR (where did you see that?), since it's just a particle simulator - you can render your points with whatever you like. Although, it does have it's own GPU rendering solution which is very fast at rendering silly amounts of particles.