New Softimage Plugins??

[kjmitch26]

Hello,

I just received an email from Wet Work by D&Esign. They primarily design plugins for RealFlow which can be viewed here http://www.informatica-3dart.it/plugins/. These guys have extensive knowledge of programming, unfortunately they have no knowledge of Softimage. I asked if they would be willing to collaborate efforts to produce Softimage plugins and their response was Yes. So my questions to the community are, what type of plugins would be most beneficial to the application and who would be willing to collaborate with the Wet Work Team to point them in the right direction pertaining to Softimage itself?

I'm really enjoying this application and would love to see more 3rd party plugins for it.

Moderator edit: please use the URL tags - HB

[owei]

Hi!

I think SI is already capable of those effects via ICE and the SPH or the upcoming Lagoa. So, in fact I don´t see a reason for these particular plugins. There is a lack good and easy to use volumic shaders right now. All this physics and simulation stuff is covered quite good by now, I think...

my 2 cents
oliver

[kjmitch26]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply. The plugins don't necessarily have to be similar to the ones they've created with RealFlow. I was just looking for a general consensus of what would be a good plugin for Softimage....one that hasn't already been created or will be implemented in the near future.

[redmotion]

There is a lack good and easy to use volumic shaders right now

I'm wondering, is this a basic mental ray issue? Are shader writers waiting for something new to be added to mental ray or is it due to Softimage not generating the right "forms" to be rendered?

I seriously would love a shader that can do this with particle sims:-http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/ See the images further down for "Lagrangian vortex particle method hybridized with an Eulerian grid based solver". That looks like smoke to me. While I like emFluid, there is no way to render realistic looking large-scale smoke. You can get some lovely ethereal smokey-type effects but not your basic "bulgy" and "billowing" smoke (which is a much larger scale smoke "shape").

That's what I'm missing...

[owei]

@redmotion

...no, it´s a softimage issue ;) just noone writes a voxelbased volume shader. The volume shader implemented is particle based, which leads to certain problems (blobbyness fading problems, huge particles counts to achieve good results ect.)
FumeFX HAS a shader for MR, as you can see here:
http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2009/ ... eased.html

So, its a matter of programming a voxelshader for MR ;)

cheers,
oliver

[Hirazi Blue]

I'll take your word for it, that a good voxel based volume shader is missing from Softimage (actually not just your word, this has been buzzing around for quite some time), but at the risk of derailing this thread too much, could someone please show me / further explain where the real problem lies?
As I don't do "fire/smoke", I really haven't got a clue...
;)

[kjmitch26]

Interesting. Thanks for the information owei.

@Hirazi Blue

I would like to know and understand this as well. I would also like to know how, in theory, this could be implemented into softimage from a software perspective.

[Maximus]

I'll take your word for it, that a good voxel based volume shader is missing from Softimage (actually not just your word, this has been buzzing around for quite some time), but at the risk of derailing this thread too much, could someone please show me / further explain where the real problem lies?
As I don't do "fire/smoke", I really haven't got a clue...
;)

the real problem is that the volume shader in softimage requires a lot of tweaking, its insanely slow when things come into play, like scattering, multi light shadows, ambient occlusion, particle density.
For a decent smoke look you would need to use an insane huge amount of particles + tweaking, and thats a lot of hours to invest on it.
It just dies at render time like the usual Mental ray philosophy. Cant be compared to fumefx one or c4d dPit or even maya's one.

[rconover]

Well no its not just the tweaking. Its is about the lack of a speciffic shader design.

It is because XSI doesn't have a shader that renders a continuous flow for fluids. aka the voxel based volume shader mentioned above.
As long as you render as points-you have the render a *billion* of them. A billion particles equals your issues Maximus.

Real fluid shaders (like fume) are not rendering particles *ever*. They are rendering fluids-as one. Its *very fast* compared to even a quite simple BA particle effect.

Its missing *big time*.