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  • Wishlist, VFX studio perspective

    First off - congratulations for the v 1.0! It's a nice start, and it has very promising features. Competition in the field is highly in the interest of us, the customers

    My point of view in this wishlist is the workflow of a VFX studio - meaning high volume, high detail, realistic work.

    That wishlist expresses what we'd like to see in Phoenix if it's to compete or, outrun FumeFX:


    Sources:

    Major:
    -Velocity vectoring. Source should have velocity magnitude, direction along the object's 3 axis, and the normals (it only has that currently). Velocity should be separate from fuel/temp/smoke, to be able to have a source that just influences velocities. Make that mappable, to be able to break its character up, have some diversity


    Solver:

    Major:
    -Fire channel. Burning fuel density should go into a fire channel. This is important.
    -Parameter to control the rate of fuel burn (density/sec/temperature)
    -Better vorticity control

    Minor:
    -Perturbation of the UV coords, to avoid the 'stringyness'. Something simpler like a warp based on temperature would be enough

    Dream:
    -Tools to handle work with MANY grids, which is ALWAYS the case in production. Possibility for one grid to pick the edge of another in a chained
    network sim, cache manager, general network sim features


    Preview:

    Major:
    -Visualize smoke

    Minor:
    -Fix the preview to a viewport. To be able to fix it to a camera, while you work in a perspective/ortho view


    Viewport:

    Major:
    -Value picker. A tool that can visualize all the params of a sum of voxels under the cursor, albeit crudely

    Minor:
    -Less obtrusive viz style (big dots like Krakatoa?), custom gradients for the channels

    Dream:
    -Make a shader (MetaSL?) that can display the thing half decently in the viewport, with decimation for speed. I tihnk Houdini has such a mode



    Rendering:

    Major:
    -Take the current emission/diffuse/alpha shader, and apply it to ALL 3 channels: fuel, fire, smoke. The current shader, with the possibilities to get color from the different sim channels is great, but fire, smoke and fuel need to be separate and then mixed. You can't shade well both fire AND smoke with a single shader. And it would be good to shade fuel too.

    -Wavelet or an analogue. You need that, or something that gives at least as good results, to compete with FumeFX

    Minor:
    -Smooth interpolation on keys in the curve editor

    -Instead of absolute values on the X and Y, use base values, which then multiply by spinner values for magnitude. This way brightness, densities, etc will be animatable and easy to tweak and generally use

    -Render fire/smoke/fuel as separate passes that can be mixed in comp

    Dream:
    -Take helium (http://lumonix.net/helium) and make a node based shader editor. Sim channels as inputs, render params as outputs, with condition/operator nodes. Take Krakatoa's Magmaflow for reference. This will open huge doors for us.

    Thanks
    Hristo Velev
    MD/FX Lead, Bottleship VFX
    Sofia, Bulgaria

  • #2
    I'm just gonna add up here, when I have time to play with Phoenix. So:

    Rendering:

    Modulation with texture is awesome to give you variation in the color of the shader. But it needs to be controllable. Add one more gradient, where the texture color is, that gives a grayscale oh how much the texture will be added per channel value, and a spinner to be able to animate the magnitude. That would really be great.
    Last edited by glacierise; 02-09-2010, 03:38 AM. Reason: formatting
    Hristo Velev
    MD/FX Lead, Bottleship VFX
    Sofia, Bulgaria

    Comment


    • #3
      Preview, Major: A tool that makes an image sequence/video file so sim can be previewed realtime.
      Hristo Velev
      MD/FX Lead, Bottleship VFX
      Sofia, Bulgaria

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by glacierise View Post
        Preview, Major: A tool that makes an image sequence/video file so sim can be previewed realtime.
        You can use the 3ds Max make animation preview tool; works fine with the Phoenix viewport preview (although not yet with the GPU preview), from Tools > Grab viewport > Create animated sequence file...

        Best regards,
        Vlado
        I only act like I know everything, Rogers.

        Comment


        • #5
          Hi Vlado

          What you describe is the way to do it in max 2011, I think. In max 2010 that I have over here, Phoenix doesn't show in the preview. Anyway, the GPU preview would need to support it, since you'll need the shading
          Hristo Velev
          MD/FX Lead, Bottleship VFX
          Sofia, Bulgaria

          Comment


          • #6
            Sources:

            Major: Particle sources need radius, and variation per particle. Driving things with the PFlow data channels would also be nice
            Hristo Velev
            MD/FX Lead, Bottleship VFX
            Sofia, Bulgaria

            Comment

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