Embergen like

[cb LLC]

Hi,
Can we have a similar system where it's fire and smoke in realtime in 3ds max? Maybe not as nice lookign as phoenix but it's real time fire and smoke. It would be nice to have the same feature

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

From what I've seen, embergen runs at conservation quality 4 and at very low grid resolution, visualizing with what is an equivalent to the Phoenix gpu preview. With Phoenix you can also trade quality for speed this way, though we've never optimized it to run fast at such low resolution like 3-4 million voxels, because these are rarely used by anyone, so such low res sims don't utilize the cpu very well and might take half a second or one second per frame. Instead we've always focused on optimizing larger simulation grids such as 50-100 million cells. Such grids are far from "realtime" with embergen as well.

Another interesting thing is that both embergen and another new gpu simulator Axion for Houdini seem to compensate for the extremely low solver quality and grid resolution with render time post processing - sharpening, adding fake lighting and so on, in order to bring out extra detail. Looks like there is demand for such render time hacks, so it's good to know.

Ultimately it comes down to a comparison like between V-Ray and Unreal - it's a tradeoff between quality and speed, and also in the case of embergen there is a lot of missing features and no integration with a host software, at least as of yet - more features and host integration will slow it down, so again it's a tradeoff...

[cb LLC]

From what I've seen, embergen runs at conservation quality 4 and at very low grid resolution, visualizing with what is an equivalent to the Phoenix gpu preview. With Phoenix you can also trade quality for speed this way, though we've never optimized it to run fast at such low resolution like 3-4 million voxels, because these are rarely used by anyone, so such low res sims don't utilize the cpu very well and might take half a second or one second per frame. Instead we've always focused on optimizing larger simulation grids such as 50-100 million cells. Such grids are far from "realtime" with embergen as well.

Another interesting thing is that both embergen and another new gpu simulator Axion for Houdini seem to compensate for the extremely low solver quality and grid resolution with render time post processing - sharpening, adding fake lighting and so on, in order to bring out extra detail. Looks like there is demand for such render time hacks, so it's good to know.

Ultimately it comes down to a comparison like between V-Ray and Unreal - it's a tradeoff between quality and speed, and also in the case of embergen there is a lot of missing features and no integration with a host software, at least as of yet - more features and host integration will slow it down, so again it's a tradeoff...

Thank you for reply. It's still would be nice to have it. There I can visually adjsut smoke dissipation in real time and it's done within five seconds otherwise I have to resim over and over to see where smoke dissipation ends.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Sure, it will be nice to optimize the low res simulations on our side as well, and add some render time hacks.

[cb LLC]

After trying it phoenix is still the king. Phoenix is way more user friendly and refined

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Long way to go though!

[fixeighted]

I needed a few smoke sims for an upcoming project and I no longer sub for Phoenix.
I thought I'd look at Embergen and it has proved to be extremely good and extremely fast, even with 100s of millions of particles,
plus it's effectively instantly viewable fully rendered as it sims. It is also a third of the cost of Phoenix so it's hard to argue against that in this instance.

Am I missing something, or is it just that it has caught up to Phoenix and is possibly even overtaking it - at least for fire etc.?

[cb LLC]

I needed a few smoke sims for an upcoming project and I no longer sub for Phoenix.
I thought I'd look at Embergen and it has proved to be extremely good and extremely fast, even with 100s of millions of particles,
plus it's effectively instantly viewable fully rendered as it sims. It is also a third of the cost of Phoenix so it's hard to argue against that in this instance.

Am I missing something, or is it just that it has caught up to Phoenix and is possibly even overtaking it - at least for fire etc.?

I agree. Chaos needs to make similar system ASAP. We told them before many times and they thought it was never needed