Afterburn and FumeFX, whats the difference?

[Morne]

Hi All

Besides FumeFX costing almost double than Afterburn, what is the difference? To me it seems they both do more or less the same thing?

Some help in explaining this to me please.

Kind Regards,
Morne

[joconnell]

Afterburn does nothing but add a rendering effect. It does nice little puffy balls of cotton and other volumetric effects that tie on to particles in max. Good for clouds, big smoke and fire. The movement is driven largely by particles though. Fume on the other hand does both rendering and movement - it does the simulation of how smoke and fire get pushed around by air and do all of those nice intricate curls that you can't get anywhere else. Because it's simulated though it's harder to control and takes longer.

Afterburn is quicker for doing large effects but it's dumb, fume is better but it's gonna take way longer to get the results you want.

Unless you're doing effects animation buy neither.

[jrandom]

Afterburn is quicker for doing large effects but it's dumb, ...

Sorry man, but that just made me laugh

[Shimakaze]

Sorry man, but that just made me laugh

It's not it's fault it didn't go to college! don't judge

[Morne]

thanks.

Any1 else have anything to add?

[jrandom]

They are actually completey different.
Afterburn = basically a render effect
fumefx = simulator

That is where your difference in price comes from.

Really both are great tools, and as John has already mentioned, afterburn is being driven by particles means you have to know how to make particles behave somewhat correctly to get the desired effect. It is simply a volumetric effect.

Fume also being a volumetric effect, is a fluid simulator with the ability to transfer its fluid motion to particles. So run a sim, and attach its velocities to a particle system. It is way "smarter" than afterburn.

It is the difference akin to using blobmesh with pflow to a fluid plugin like glu3d or realflow to create water pouring from a glass. You can make it look good but to get your dynamics right... thats alot more work.

[instinct]

Mind you that larger scale simulation with Fume can get pretty out of hand. If you need to simulate big smokeplumes/explosions or alike simulation times will be enourmous to get a high detail result. Also the cache files needed will be huge eventually. Currently doing a shot that takes over a gigabyte fluidcache per frame...so be sure to grab a good machine :P

Regards,
Thorsten

[Da_elf]

AAUUURRRRAAAA!!!! hehe. i miss that little guy

[Morne]

OK here is the scenario:

I have 6 smoke grenades being deployed via short rocket burst from a moving vehicle. The grenades travel in the air for about 30 - 50 meters (you see the smoke trail or rocket trail from each) and then the smoke grenades explode and gives of a lot of smoke (hmm maybe 10m diameter smoke cover each). Secondary grenades come from these explosions and fall to the ground while continuously giving of smoke. While this going on, 2 to 5 rpg are being fired so again you see the "rocket trail". Rpg "hits" stuff and explodes and gives of shockwave on the ground. All this happens at the same time on the screen while buildings are burning in the background and other vehicles are driving in the dust.

So here is what we have at the same timeframe:
1. 6 smoke grenades exploding
2. 12 "rocket trails" from these
3. Rocket trails from 3-5 rpgs
4. Explosions from rpg
5. Shockwaves from explosions
6. Dust clouds from vehicles driving in dust
7. Buildings burning in background

P.S. I did this before without any plugins just using max particle spray, particle array and fire effect with explosion. It did the job at the time, but I would like to do it BETTER next time around...

Which between fumefx and afterburn will be best suited to achieve quickest results with less fuss and resources?

[Da_elf]

afterburn. the calculation times for fume on that scene would be madness. but it would look awsome thats for sure

[joconnell]

To be honest, both. For the smoke trails you're gonna hit on of the main weaknesses of fume in that it's a simulation that happens inside a cubic grid. If you use a grid with smaller cells you get far better detail but way higher memory requirements so you're talking about using windows 64 bit and a huge machine. Here is where afterburn comes in very useful - a simple trail isn't going to have any intricate curling movements or interaction with anything else so the afterburn cotton ball is going to be far quicker to setup and probably get you higher quality results than fume. For the explosions you could get better results with fume by simming maybe three different explosions and reusing them around the scene - you'll get far more sophisticated results in terms of movement than you would with afterburn.

Now we come back to the practical side of it, it's a really big undertaking and while not trying to discourage you from going as big as you can, probably default to afterburn and a copy of the cg academy afterburn training dvds by allan mckay or if you're new to particles, get his single advanced visual effects dvd - while it's not as full on afterburn as the other set, it'll cover enough for what you're doing and give you the value of lots of other useful knowledge - http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPrevie....cfm/ID/236836

[instinct]

Well they mix fine. For example you can use the fumefx follow operator to do a rough fumesim that controls PFlow wich you can render with Afterburn. Also in the latest versions Fume and Afterburn use a unified rendering architecture (Fusionworks renderer) and mix happily. So you can use fume for advanced effects and Afterburn for the big scale stuff (like rockettrails and alike).

For Fire i'd say fume is a must as it looks a TON better then ABurn Fire.

Fume can do a HELL of a Job for explosions but it might be overkill in the Scenario that you described. Here are some nice examples:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RHGrPo0J-R4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc-TLZOYtJA&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj20qTtfC2w

Kind Regards,
Thorsten

[Morne]

Hi Guys

Thank you very much for the replies, the info and the links.

Best Regards,
Morne