Softimage Explosia FX released!

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Explosia FXAuthor: Oleg Bliznuk
Not to be confused with Oleg's Implosia FX, a mesh scattering simulator— A new gaseous fluids (fire and smoke) simulator from Ukraine based company Blackcore tech. This product features dynamic voxel grids, a CPU accelerated raymarched preview, OpenVDB export, the »render from camera« feature — (see videos) — all build around an ICE node-based workflow.

From the product page: ExplosiaFX is a fluid dynamics simulation tool currently integrated in Autodesk Softimage. It is constructed based on a dynamically resizing voxel grid with a modern multigrid solver and thus provides high quality results in reasonable time. Intensive usage of AVX instructions when available makes it extremely fast without any compromises. By supporting the OpenVDB volumetric format, ExplosiaFX removes the need to render simulated data in Softimage, makes easy pipelining possible, as well as external cache processing on the Softimage side. [..] cont'd on the product page (link at bottom).

For demo videos, see Oleg's vimeo and the youtube channel. Also, the ExplosiaFX google group was set up.

Discontinued - the product is not available for purchase anymore but a fully functional noncommercial version is still available in the si-community thread (and in local backup)

local backup: XSI_EFX_Workgroup_1.007_win64.zip XSI_EFX_Workgroup_1.007_win64_AVX.zip (for CPUs supporting AVX) XSI_EFX_SampleScenes.zip Documentation.pdf Package overview slides.pdf

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Tekano
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Tekano » 23 Nov 2015, 22:07

Mr.Core wrote: Is there any error in the history when you tried to render with mray ?
sure, I never got past further than this stuck at 0% whereas Arnold and your preview render rendered fine. it is just a default create smoke preset from the menu

// INFO : [EFX][VDB][Node:FieldIO][WriteVDB]: Updating D:\projects\<snipped>\xsi\efx_cache\smoke_created2\light_mscatt_b00362.vdb

// ERROR : PHEN 0.10 17 MB error: [EFX]:[ERROR]IoError: could not get size of file D:\projects\<snipped>\xsi\efx_cache\smoke_created2\velx00362.vdb

<and Y and Z of vel>

// WARNING : PHEN 0.8 17 MB warn 052009: running out of stack space, breaking shader call recursion.
// WARNING : PHEN 0.9 19 MB warn 052009: running out of stack space, breaking shader call recursion.
// WARNING : PHEN 0.11 20 MB warn 052009: running out of stack space, breaking shader call recursion.
// WARNING : PHEN 0.10 20 MB warn 052009: running out of stack space, breaking shader call recursion.
// WARNING : PHEN 0.12 20 MB warn 052009: running out of stack space, breaking shader call recursion.
// WARNING : PHEN 0.5 20 MB warn 052009: running out of stack space, breaking shader call recursion.

then xsi hangs heavy / freezes gives option to restart. bah Mental Ray! :D

l I circumnavigated with emfluid5s ability to load a vdb file into a grid and use Holgers BAFluid shader to render it with. equivelent speeds to Arnold also but not as fast as your preview render :-bd
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Mr.Core
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Mr.Core » 23 Nov 2015, 22:18

Is this "<snipped>" label is just a hidden name by you or it is a true name reported by xsi ? I am asking because windows does not allow such brackets to be in name of folder/file - in this case i'd like to know the non-distorted full path to file.
Also can you please attach any sample vdb file generated by efx, lets say smoke.vdb ?

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Tekano
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Tekano » 23 Nov 2015, 22:25

its just a really long path that is <snipped> sorry was lots of text otherwise

here is link to 1 frame of vdb
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Tekano
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Tekano » 23 Nov 2015, 22:45

ha lol got it to work with Mental Ray by backtracking to a previous version and redoing the process properly.

so user error here. firstly had left the path in the shader to
<whatever path>/scene when it should have been
<whatever path>/[scene]/ using the [scene] token. when it did not work I started replacing tokens with explicit paths - fine until I change the scene name later on!

secondly I did not have write smoke and velocity enabled in the EFX initialise system parameters

Also, I think that had tried rendering with Arnold beforehand in the same scene and not regenerated files just changed the shader from EFX_FluidShaderGraph_ai to EFX_FluidShaderGraph_mi and setting the renderer to Mental Ray. which causes the problems I had about stack space whatever when I do a render region -

so lol sheepish grin, :ymblushing: EFX mental ray shader works fine if you follow the instructions !
render_region_dry_ice_mental_ray.png
tldr; user error. it seemed I was pointing to older versions of files by changing token paths to explicit
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Mr.Core
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Mr.Core » 24 Nov 2015, 01:27

Good to hear :) Absence of stable ways to bring the ice string data into the rendertree leads to such redudant path synchronizations and corresponding typos. Too bad its impossible to make like the fumefx approach

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xsi_fanatic
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by xsi_fanatic » 15 Feb 2016, 15:21

Mr.Core wrote:Good to hear :) Absence of stable ways to bring the ice string data into the rendertree leads to such redudant path synchronizations and corresponding typos. Too bad its impossible to make like the fumefx approach
Any chance this works with Redshift ?

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FXDude
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by FXDude » 15 Feb 2016, 21:46

Since Explosia works with VDB's and redshift VDB support is right around the corner, from what I can tell it seems that chances are rather good!

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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Mr.Core » 15 Feb 2016, 22:28

FXDude is right, Openvdb is here, but its only as a source of data for shading, the shader itself you have to build (or tune) on the RS side, since there is no way to do such tight integration as with arnold ( due to GPU nature of RS )

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FXDude
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by FXDude » 16 Jun 2016, 22:21

Bad news!
Roughly a week before SI RS VDBs became available,

http://blackcore.technology/softimage_efx
Availability
Sorry, this product no more available for purchase.

INSYDIUM LTD has acquired ExplosiaFX, Blackcore will continue supporting and bug fixing ExplosiaFX until 2016 end.
Quotes from RS Forum
_________________
KISSB

interestingly, explosia isn’t available for purchase anymore…


_________________
ionart

OMG! nooooo…... :(


_________________
Artur Woźniak

Hasn’t it been released for free?

Artur
Talk about timing!



Few quotes from RS forum
_________________
deroesi

so cinema4d only in the future?

to be honest I gave up when it came to volumes, fluids and rbd sims in softimage and simply bought houdini indie which was even cheaper than any plugin for SI. (and this stuff is pretty straight forward in H when you start with a shelf tool)

how does SI+explosia compare to H speed/mem/usability wise? any user here? (the samples look indeed awesome)

______________
owei

@deroesi
Sure..and now that indie supports 3rd party renderer, that would be a solution..if you are small enough wink

If one wants to stay with soft, emFluid is still there wink
http://www.mootzoid.com/plugin/emfluid5

Lookig forward to test VDBs for soft NOW wink Was about time and I´m happy, that it is there now..

cheers,
oli

______________
druitre
deroesi - 15 June 2016 05:36 PM

how does SI+explosia compare to H speed/mem/usability wise? any user here? (the samples look indeed awesome)
Bad news, about explosiaFX.

I have it and it works fantastically fast, mainly because of the preview system that gives near-final quality results in real time.

You can iterate the bananas out of your scene before ever cashing or rendering.

Downside is that MR doesn’t allow for SRT changes on your fluid box, so if you don’t have Arnold you’re stuck with just one fluid per scene.

Also more complicated setups - fluid boxes interacting with each other and dynamic obstacles, advections that would be the result of these kind of interactions, etc - are not possible to see in the preview system or not possible to achieve as far as I know.

All that being said, I’m going to try and see how far I can get with RS and VDB cashed ExplosiaFX.

Cheers, Jasper


Insydium are the makers of Xparticles for C4d
and buying Blackcore which is fine, but for the life of me, what in the world is the point of removing availability?

So Hope you had the chance to download the (fully functional) trial before then!


Nevertheless, here is a passage about working with EFX VDB cache sequence with RS.
_________________
ionart
efx_cache\SCN004_VDB\smoke#####.vdb
with this syntay.. its looking for the sequence better… sometimes i get this message:
’ WARNING : [Redshift] Failed to find volume file efx_cache\SCN004_VDB\smoke00022.vdb. Volume will be empty


_________________
Adrian

#### works.
[frame] works if the digits in your vds correspond to the frame value which is just a number with no leading zeroes

Thank you

Cheers

_________________
ionart

okay… in cases i have to build a new container…
framenumbers are replaced with: #####
working fine!
cheers

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Mr.Core
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Mr.Core » 16 Jun 2016, 23:00

Hi FXDude,
the latest build (and all subsequent updates till 2016 end) can be found here : http://blackcore.technology/get_softimage_efx. It is fully functional trial without license :) In regard of all licension-related questions please write me to olehbliznuk AT gmail DOT com
Also i have to note, i only sold explosiafx, not the entire blackcore :) All existing customers are still will be able to get the new solver (whatever it would be called) for free.
thanks for understanding,
Oleg

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Mr.Core
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Mr.Core » 16 Jun 2016, 23:04

one more note:
i am not a user of redshift but afaik they only support vdb grid from the single file with all required fields . Explosiafx has a special node for such caching ( by default all channels get saved to different vdb/native files) : EFX Export VDB
its pretty straightforward to use, and it works independently of the solver caching settings, take a look inside of it if something is unclear.

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FXDude
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by FXDude » 16 Jun 2016, 23:18

Mr.Core wrote:Hi FXDude,
the latest build (and all subsequent updates till 2016 end) can be found here : http://blackcore.technology/get_softimage_efx. It is fully functional trial without license :) In regard of all licension-related questions please write me to olehbliznuk AT gmail DOT com
Also i have to note, i only sold explosiafx, not the entire blackcore :) All existing customers are still will be able to get the new solver (whatever it would be called) for free.
thanks for understanding,
Oleg
Oh! #:-s \:D/

I guess I was thrown off by the link not being in it's usual spot in the page.

& Congratz with your new endeavors with Insydium! (and not to mention ... for Explosia itself! )

& thanks for the info
Cheers

(& also all only good news then :ymsmug: )

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Hirazi Blue » 17 Jun 2016, 15:24

Just started playing with this, but I can’t get it to render. Using the basic “Create Smoke” I’ve created a sequence of “efx1” files,
changed the “FolderPath” in the “EFX_FluidShaderGraph” to the scene stored in the "efx_cache” and the FileName to “smoke$F5”, but it still renders black…

What am I doing wrong? Probably very-RTFM-related... :p

edit: getting the following error:

Code: Select all

# ERROR : PHEN 0.8     33 MB error: [EFX]:[ERROR][PackedVolumeShader]: Unable to open volumeShader file! E:\Exordium\redshifttests\efx_cache\Scene\smoke00036.efx1sh
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

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FXDude
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by FXDude » 17 Jun 2016, 16:46

Are there different cache formats?

I don't think RS looks for *.efx1sh files.


There is also RS file references with the [frame] token (without leading zeroes) or #### (with leading zeroes) to consider.

Otherwise perhaps posting on RS?

'Kissb' posted a basic test sequence

XSIMan!
with lightning fast flaming fart superpowers! :p

Image

Image
KISSB

I’ve tested it a few hours ago, mixing xsi-man with the default explosia flamethrower scene,
it was very fast.

Render times between 1-2 sec/frame, depending on how much smoke I’ve had there
( 1 area light, 720p, 1 brute force bounce, which seemed to have no effect, but it was probably my fault )


File Attachments

Comp.avi (File Size: 15135KB - Downloads: 24)

1-2 sec? was that a typo for 12 sec/frame?

12 sec would have been pretty darn fast. But 1-2 seconds (?) ...

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Hirazi Blue
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by Hirazi Blue » 17 Jun 2016, 16:51

The error occurred while testing it in MR.
How would I export this to VDB?
:-?
Stay safe, sane & healthy!

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FXDude
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Re: Softimage Explosia FX released!

Post by FXDude » 17 Jun 2016, 16:54

Perhaps on the EFX support site then?

https://groups.google.com/forum/?#!forum/explosiafx

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