emFluid4 v.4.0 (alpha) - "Fire & Smoke Walk With Me".

About one minute of test-renderings using the alpha version of emFluid4.

All simulations and renderings were made on a single workstation with an Intel i7 processor using Softimage 2011 SAP, Mental Ray and the factory particle volume shader.
The compositing was done with the Fx Tree, the music with Reason 4.0.

The amount of particles varies from 500K to 10M, the render times from 1-6 minutes per frame (one point light + shadows + Final Gathering). Aside from a little post (color correction and some glow) the renderings are "as is".

Description

emFluid4 is a fluid solver for Softimage|XSI's ICE and is typically used to produce fire, smoke and dust effects.
It is the successor of emFluid3.

The plugin consists of an Addon that contains a "DLL" file (Windows) or "so" file (Linux) for the fluid solver node (compiled C++ code for 64 bit versions of Softimage). Additionally, there are many compounds as well as a shader compound that come along. They allow you to plug objects and/or their geometry into the emFluid4 node or compound, create particles from the internal emFluid4 grids and automatically colorize the particles depending on their type and heat.

You can use objects and geometry to add velocity, fuel, heat, etc. to the fluid boxes in which the particles move around. An optimized workflow and a setup-builder will let you create fire and smoke in just a couple of minutes. Furthermore the shader compound that is included in the addon will allow you to render the point clouds with Mental Ray and the factory particle volume shader.
All compounds are "public", so that you can dig into them to make more advanced modifications.

emFluid4 is well integrated into ICE and you use it just as easily as all the other nodes and compounds in ICE.

Some Features

• Multithreaded solver.


• Single, multiple or automatic fluid boxes.


• Data emission from nearly any object type (meshes, nurbs, curves, point clouds, ..).


• Combustion of Fuel and own particle types for Flame, Smoke and Waste.


• Data grid based particle emission or "normal" particle emission ... or both at the same time.


• An "open" solver, meaning the internal grids and data are exposed in a way so that you can enhance the pre-built compounds and functionality with own compounds.


• Velocity can be generated directly ("velocity emission") or indirectly ("combustion", "buoyancy", "expansion") or by using a combination of both.


• Automatic creation of emFluid4 setups based on the current selection.


• Fluid boxes can be translated/rotated/scaled during the simulation.


• Point clouds that use emFluid4 are still just "ordinary" point clouds => they can be cached and rendered just as any other point cloud.


• The internal 3d fluid grids of emFluid4 can be directly meshed with emPolygonizer3.

A video showing some of the new features can be watched here.

A commercial spot made by the company Insane4frame VFX in Munich.
All the smoke and steam effects were made with emFluid4 and rendere with the BA_Fluid volume shader from Holger (Binary Alchemy):

Some cool volume test renderings by Oliver (pixelpanic) using emFluid4 and the BA_Fluid volume shader from Holger (Binary Alchemy):

A nice rendering by YUJAEHO of one of the demo scenes: