So the Ember Texmap is really awesome and I can see a lot of potential with it. The problem is that it seems pretty slow. I’m using what I think is fairly low resolution spacing as far as Ember is concerned and the setup is very simple. Do you have any suggestions that I could do to speed it up?
I should mention if the topic didn’t make it clear that I used the Ember Texmap as an opacity map inside FumeFX render settings (so not at sim time, just at render time).
I’d like to add that on top of hopefully adding some optimization options to the Ember Texmap to speed up the render times, it would be very nice if the Ember Texmap had a “noise” feature. What I plan to use this for right now is to use the Ember Texmap as a mask to choose where I add cellular and 3D fractal maps to my cloud sculpts done using FumeFX. This way I can, in the viewport, be very specific about where I add what kind of detail and make it a creative and directed process rather than a fairly random one. But I can foresee it being very useful in other scenarios as well.
If it would speed up things significantly, using just sphere gizmos would make me happy as long as it had the noise feature (along with the Blur that’s already there). Ideally any geometry would be awesome, but if that can’t be made faster (I feel it’s too slow for production right now), then having a simple shape like a sphere would still add a lot of control and make the Ember Texmap very useful.
It seems that the Ember Texmap ignores the grid resolution of the EmberSim because no matter how coarse I set the resolution, the teapot is still represented perfectly. Is that one of the reasons it’s slow?
Edit: Thinking about it I guess I could just add some noise to the magma flow so I don’t really need it in the map.
The Blur parameter in the Ember Texmap doesn’t seem to be hooked up. You are probably aware of this but just wanted to post it just in case.
So I decided to try a levelset instead and render times went from 1m38s to 0m8s!! Massive improvement. That’s without shadows. With shadows it’s an even greater improvement (see next post). So it seems using a levelset is the way to go for this. Awesome!
Example renders with render times comparing Levelset and InVolume. It totally makes sense why Levelset is so much faster, I just haven’t spent much time with either Magma or Ember. So with Levelset you can completely control the resolution you need depending on your object.
As I am getting more and more familiar with magma and Ember I am starting to figure this out. I took the signed distance out of the Levelset, put a clamp on it and then used a blend to get the falloff I wanted. Next step is to control how it falls off rather than in a linear fashion that I got it to now but I think that shouldn’t be too hard. If at any point you see this thread and have any tips, please write. For now I am hoping that this might be useful to someone else. I just came across Bobo’s Krakatoa Cloud tutorial which I hadn’t seen before but I think I am still going to go through Fume to create these clouds and nebulae that I want to create because I like the Multiple Scattering in Fume.
You could get a noisy look just by multiplying the result of a Noise node fed by the Position channel dived by 25.0 or so. If you can’t have disconnected regions you can use a NearestPoint query to find the closest point on the mesh and use that as the value fed into the Noise node.
Thanks! I’ll test that out!