okay FX guys - I have this dream. the dream is that you can create ‘base’ simulations with a fraction of the detail/particles that you would normally require to get a ‘look’, and once you get in the ballpark that you can use Stoke to fill out the gaps [generate many more particles], manipulate the result further [refine the look] and generally create a library of low-res particle data sets in PRT or other form that you can reuse ad nauseum.
the background is this:
at FF, we would create sims and reuse them all the time. these sims were huge, and often we discarded useful particle data because of storage concerns.
my brain and my heart tell me there is a better way - so i’ll propose some concepts for you to sleep on, and hopefull take up the banner to push us to give you the tools to do these types of things.
- create small prt’s of seed animation for smoke puffs, blood spurts, splashes, waves, waterfalls, wormholes, explosions, clouds etc. use these seed simulations to generate high-res, high-detail renders on-demand.
- create one breath puff or smoke hit, or blood spurt, and use stoke [and some maxscript?] to generate hundreds of variations to save as libraries for a show where you need a lot of elements fast.
- use your favourite sim tool - naiad, fume, realflow - to iterate with low-fidelity and enhance/refine/repopulate with stoke
3/5 blend your favourte sims [10% of sim 1, 20% of sim 2, 70% of sim3] to gain new results. remember when the director says ‘can you split these two sims in the middle?’ - build complex systems from a series of simple assets by looping your iteration [save a simple system to PRT, bring in, duplicate, merge/ savfe out again, rinse repeat etc]
anyway, some ideas.
give us more!
cb