trying to develop a bread rendering technique (like in Pixar's Ratatouille)

[jstrob]

another test trying to smooth the surface. By thee way we don't see the texture effect in the viewport with vraymetaball but we see it with the krakatoa frost method.

[jstrob]

In add mode (I stoppped the render cause it's a bit too long. with frost it takes only a few seconds.)

[jstrob]

Now I'm exploring the example files in houdini and I will try to do my swiss cheese with vdb inside houdini. This is so fast and amazing! You can do fields, volume fog surface do whatever you want with all of them convert from one another, combine boolean, advect point in the fields etc. Lighting fast! With the sticky notes they explain everything so it's lightning fast to understand too.

[joconnell]

You might like the implementation of bullet 3 by alpha fx in that case - they've loads of tools to convert mesh to vfb for rendering with the volume grid!

[jstrob]

Thanks jJohn! Yes I am currently testing BulletFX too. But I didn't try the openVDB modifier yet. Anyway the trial is a bit too limited I'm waiting for a full version. even with a simple cube it's telling me I have too many vertices for the trial... also it's one more plugin for 3ds max and they all cost more than houdini indie!

[joconnell]

Yep I hear ya. I'm excited about the possibility of some really simple fluid whether it's lucid or bullet, it'll be great for me for simple vfx elements like bullet hits or blood splats. The vdb stuff looks interesting in terms of the new faster volume grid rendering for things like doing clouds too - apparently there's now texture based displacement of volume grids which is very interesting

[jstrob]

I'll be following all those technology for a while cause it will take a few years before I'm comfortable enough with Houdini anyway (and before vray for Houdini is ready too).

I played a bit with vdb and volume noise in Houdini to see how it goes and it's almost real time for the generation and super fast for rendering too.

[super gnu]

yep.. the mind boggles at how fast houdini is for some stuff. im not sure what kind of rendertimes you were getting with vraymetaball, but that test i uploaded for you took 8 hrs on a 4.6ghs 6 core machine. hardly practical. i wonder how its possible for houdini to do it so much faster. youd think hard-coded stuff would be faster than node based tools.

[super gnu]

another quick test with vraymetaball. if it wasnt for the rendertimes id say you could use it.. seems quite capable of swiss cheese to me i think you need to tweak your cellular map differently to work with the metaball setup. in case its interesting, max file included.

metabal_cheese.zip



rendertimes have been (partially) reduced for me by reducing the particle density.. i assumed the number of particles wouldnt hugely affect the rendertime, but it does have quite an impact. its a shame because to accurately fill a volume with vraymetaball, you need a small particle radius to stop it being all blobby.

And you can only use a small radius with craploads of particles.. If you are doing a volumetric thing like this the particles need to continue throughout the whole volume, you cant just scatter them on the surface if the source mesh.

really need this decoupling from particles to be useful in this case. as mentioned in another thread, a simple modifer to convert a source mesh into an isosurface would be great.. assuming it didnt take hours to render.

[jstrob]

My small vraymetaball cube you can see the render time on the screen capture. It was rendering since 7 minutes and still an "estimated" 9 minutes to go. But the mesh generation was also very slow. Frost is fast but still nowhere near vdb in houdini which are voxel based instead of using particles.

Now I'm trying to install Houdini engine for max to see what it can do but it doesn't work so far.

[jstrob]

Ok I'll take a look at you scene thanks!

[super gnu]

just thought id try something more like the houdini example in vraymetaball:




as you can see its quite capable of doing this stuff, but

a) no preview for setting up

b) impossible to accurately fill a volume, the "blobby" nature of the metaballs means you get a soft approximation of the form. the less particles, the worse the approximation. there is no geometry clipping that could help.

c) that render took 8 hrs and 59 minutes on a overclocked 6 core, at 720p.

-that is with the number of particles reduced to a minimum to try speeding things up, and caching enabled, although that doesnt seem to really make any difference.

has to be some room for order-of-magnitude speedups somewhere..

mind boggles that a bumpy surface with no texture or reflections, and no gi ( just a domelight and sun) should be anything other than really fast, even if it is very detailed.

[jstrob]

So it is really working with your scene. I'm just wondering why it was not working in my scene cause I didn't find a major difference in the setup. Anyway I won't investigate further casue it's just too slow.
This image took around an hour and half with all my render farm in DR!

[jstrob]

I did this one in Houdini with VDB. It generates in 2 seconds and renders in 1 second approx.

[jstrob]

And now for the final solution!

I created a digital asset in Houdini and loaded it in max via houdini engine. I can now tweak my swiss cheese with all the parameters that I chose myself directly in max. It's super fast and also renders perfectly and fast!

And the best of all it seems like houdini engine for max is completely free thanks to Suzuki san! I wonder what will be the limitation of this workflow. I'm gonna have some fun with Houdini inside of max!!!