[eric nixon]

JD, awesome news about getting tfd to work, most unexpected

Could you outline the workflow, I just tried quickly to use it but got nothing.. my setup is c4d r13.061 and tfd 1160.

[Aniki]

Eventually the whining helped

I get crashes in the latest Maxwell beta, when trying to render TFD without the respective channels active. Would rather want a warning message.

Scrubbing the timeline while Fire is active doesn't update the Container yet.

Is Coloring supported already? Will you add emission based on the TFD shaders as well? Or are emissive volumetrics not supported by Maxwell yet?

[JDHill]

Could you outline the workflow, I just tried quickly to use it but got nothing.. my setup is c4d r13.061 and tfd 1160.

There's really not much to it, you just put a Maxwell Volumetric tag on your TFD Container. If that's not working, I suppose it could come down to the TFD version; I am coding & testing against v1.0 1369.

I get crashes in the latest Maxwell beta, when trying to render TFD without the respective channels active. Would rather want a warning message.

At this point in time, I still don't know enough about what might or might not cause problems, so I can neither avoid them, nor offer warning messages (such problems will usually reside outside the plugin itself).

Scrubbing the timeline while Fire is active doesn't update the Container yet.

If you mean that you want the volumetric to update in FIRE when the timeline is scrubbed, I doubt that will ever be the case, since it can be quite a large amount of data that needs to transferred.

Is Coloring supported already? Or are emissive volumetrics not supported by Maxwell yet?

The answer is no, on both of these questions. Colors will be supported, if I understand correctly, by multiplying voxel color with texture (or textures?) in the material. At this point, about all that works is material color, and some default UVs, since there are problems in the volumetric extension with the voxel UV arrays.

Will you add emission based on the TFD shaders as well?

If this were supported in the engine, I assume it would be done via emitter materials, using a mechanism similar to what is mentioned above for colors.

[eric nixon]

Thanks for explaining, I've got it working now the combo thats working here is R14 + tfd 1291

[eric nixon]

Quite a few heavy crashes, (but I am a noob with tfd) I've got some simple scenes working but the car tyre smoke scene I made a long time ago just renders weird.

Anyhow, I was wondering about the resampling resolution,... Is there a rule of thumb for the relationship between the tfd voxel size and maxwells output resolution? And how is maxwell resampling that data? < feel free to ignore that Q if its too complex to explain.

[JDHill]

The plugin samples based on the Simulation Cell Size. Meaning, it takes the domain (i.e. Grid Size in TFD), and samples it according to Simulation Cell Size, factoring for the current export scale.

[eric nixon]

Hmm, I dont quite understand, does that mean the default of 0.01 is translating one for one (assuming scene export scale is also at the default setting of 0.01)

Btw. I've been 'punishing' the plugin for a few weeks now, and its very solid, thanks.. have been very productive. The mxm previews go haywire often but i dont really care about that. The only thing that cost me time is the bizarre situation, where a material that had disp enabled was applied to a poly selection (the disp was previously being ignored by the old plug). In that case a warning would have saved me, took quite a while to debug that one...

[JDHill]

It means that regardless the export scale, the domain is sampled at the real (m) size specified by Simulation Cell Size.

The only thing that cost me time is the bizarre situation, where a material that had disp enabled was applied to a poly selection (the disp was previously being ignored by the old plug). In that case a warning would have saved me, took quite a while to debug that one...

I don't think the plugin has ever purposefully ignored displacement, but I do see that a crash is produced in 3.0.13 (and so also in the plugin) when a material with pretesselated displacement is assigned to a selection. I'm not sure, off-hand, if this has yet been reported.

[Aniki]

At this point, about all that works is material color, and some default UVs, since there are problems in the volumetric extension with the voxel UV arrays.

So what is the material color supposed to do right now? What is working?

[JDHill]

The same thing any material does, when assigned to a volumetric. As for what is working, UVs are written, but are not properly handled in the engine in the current version, and the colors array is not yet handled at all. So basically, forget for now that the Voxel Channels and Voxel Channel Normalization sections exist.

[Aniki]

I am referring to this setting:



Doesn't seem to sample the shader colors from the TFD Smoke Shader though?

[JDHill]

The plugin does sample and store those colors, but the engine does not yet render them.

[Aniki]

excellent, looking forward;) Will the custom density and opacity curves from TFD be honored as well some time?

[JDHill]

I'm not sure. From TFD I get RGBA samples, but it is only the RGB part which will have meaning to Maxwell.

[Aniki]

You dont get density, temperature etc at all?