Here is a simple file with a moving emitter in a fluid. The detail depends on the fluid resolution in this case and no texturing was used. I created the file in a few minutes starting with a default 3d fluid and emitter. The emitter was parented to an animated sphere, and thus gets the motion of the sphere. The emitter settings are otherwise at the defaults.
The fluid node was setup as follows:
1. Make the transparency very low( but not zero or the render will look chunky).
2. Enable self shadows but turn off real lights to speed up rendering.
3. Make density buoyancy zero.
4. Make the temperature method = "Dynamic Grid"
5. Increase the temperature turbulence and buoyancy, as well as the temperature scale. Also add some temperature dissipation.. the exact amount is critical for a good look.
6. Set "High Detail Solve" to "All grids". This and perhaps a little velocity->swirl helps to get more detail in the smoke.
7. Set "Render Interpolator" to "Smooth"
8. Make the fluid a tight fit for the desired path of the smoke. To do this shape the fluid using the size X,Y,Z attribute, then adjust the resolution so it is in proportion to these size values. So if sizeX is 2 times sizeY then resolutionX should also be 2 times resolutionY.
9. Due to the tight fit I set all the fluid boundaries to "none". This way the smoke is not trapped in a tight box and air can flow in and out of the fluid grid.
10. Simulate at a moderate resolution to preview, then increase to the desired resolution before rendering( always making sure to keep the resolution proportional to the size values ).
11. I slightly adjusted the opacity input bias and also moved the first gradient indice very slightly to the right to threshold the bottom end of the density, although this is not that important. You can also adjust the incandescence ramp and bias value to improve the look. I made the color ramp grey instead of white to look more like smoke than steam. If you instead want it all the way to black then turn off self shadowing as it will have no effect( this will speed up rendering ). Another way to speed rendering might be to lower the fluid shading quality, although if too low you will see dithering artifacts(dots). The fluid is also blurry so one could perhaps even get away without any antialiasing in the render settings.
I didn't bother caching but simply rendered, allowing the render to also run the simulation. It took about 50 sec a frame on my machine( most of that time was rendering ). However if you are going to render on a farm then you should first cache the simulation... only the temperature and density grids need to be cache in this example.
Simple moving fireball with Maya Fluids
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Posted by LeeMurray on 30 Apr, 2007 at 02:23 AMI am looking for a solution to a problem I have with Maya version 7, I modelled a character in polygon’s then converted it to Sub D’s; then I created a rig and bound the mesh to the rig using smooth bind.
The problem I have is using the “paint skin weights tool “ . I try to paint the weights and influence to the corresponding areas but the tool will not up date in real time, no matter what I do, the tool doesn’t respond properly and update in real time as it should.
I don’t have very large files and the models are not very Polygon intensive. I thought maybe the problem could be with the way I build my model so I built a few more in various ways, but the tool still doesn’t update in real time.
For example if I select bone 1 in the list and start to paint the weight influence nothing really happens, but if I select bone 2 then revert back to bone 1 then influence updates.
I have a dual quad core 64bit machine and run windows XP and have a Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 graphics card and use 8 Gigs or ram so I don’t think the is a hardware or memory issue. I would appreciate any help you could give with this problem.
Lee
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Posted by strob on 27 Apr, 2007 at 05:26 AMIt was not really new. Duncan was not allowed to talk about the upcoming maya version. But he showed what we can do with nCloth and it is really much more than cloth. You can simulate cloth, gelly, flesh, metal (car crash), aerodynamic (paper plane flying realistically), zipper, tearing, demolition (house crash), internal pressure (balloon and parachute), cutting a cake, and all this in real time!!!
Posted by pixelmonk on 27 Apr, 2007 at 04:30 AMso anything new presented at Montreal last night? 
Posted by strob on 26 Apr, 2007 at 01:21 PMI just came back from the presentation here in Montreal and it was great!!! Thanks a lot to Duncan for his time. We appreciated a lot and were very very impressed by the capabilities of Ncloth. Mostly impressive were the caching feature and the real time cloth simulation with an interactive zipper and the interactive tearing or the rag doll setup using Ncloth and the slide on surface constaint. And there was a beautiful final with a lot of paper planes flying in the room. I like the way Duncan seems to play like a child while doing his so rigourous and precise work.
Duncan, people like you are very precious, I’m your biggest fan! Please keep the good work and help us, effect artists keep enjoying our work and being able to go home not too late at night with your effective tools!
Posted by JimBough on 26 Apr, 2007 at 01:50 AMBest of Luck with your presentation tonight, Bid D, I’m sure you’ll bring down the house, or whatever simulation your using in your demo !
Posted by amorgan on 25 Apr, 2007 at 09:08 AMAmazing work.
Posted by Duncan Brinsmead on 17 Apr, 2007 at 02:09 AMThat site is still active, but you may have needed a silver membership to access it. I need to figure out how to download all those posts, so I can create a compiled listing for this site.
http://forums.alias.com/webx?14@@.3baec116
Posted by gustavo.s on 16 Apr, 2007 at 03:46 PMHi Duncan,
Amazing work. As usual.
I was wandering if there was still a link to the post in your old blog, where you have tons of fluids posts.
Regards
gus.
