Ionic Maya Demo

Hi,
I've been busy lately but I've been working in the plugin stability, as I'm planning to release a demo at the end of october.
In this video you can see a very simple demo of how Ionic works in Maya, just to give you an idea of speed and UI. The video compression make things look a bit weird, though.
Stay tuned! ;O)

Lighthouse test

32 millions of particles, 600 frames, 4h 30m

Now the plugin supports Maya Fields, there's one field at the beginning creating some turbulence and then pushing the water a couple of times during the sim.
By the way, this is all in one pass, all the splashes comes directly from the simulation.

New solver for Ionic, 36 millions of particles

Hi!
While working on my SPH and DEM solver I had an idea of a new way to solve this that allows many more particles, and this is the first test. It's not full SPH, it's not FLIP, it's something.... else :O)
It's still in a a very early stage, but it seems promising to me, no foam yet for this one, I'll continue with it next week when I come back from my holidays.
36 millions of particles, 300 frames, 1hour 30 minutes

First foam test

First test of foam, Ionic Maya opencl

5 millions of particles, 1h 20 minutes
Creating foam directly with sph particles is a bit tricky, this is the first test :)

Ionic SPH 8 millions of particles

Hi! I made a quick test of the OpenCL SPH solver to check the new optimizations I implemented and this is the result, as always with a Nvidia GTX670: 
- 8 million particles
- 450 frames
- 1h 50 minutes
So, well I have to say I'm quite happy now with the speed, and I don't think I can optimize it much more. Next step: Foam! :O) Cheers!

More particles, more frames...

More Particles, more frames, more sim time.... :) 1.4 millions of particles, improved simulation parameters. 450 frames, Simulation time 1h 45 minutes (update: just 25 minutes with the new optimized version) The color is fixed on the particles once all of them are emitted, it's just particleIdx / numParticles Next time I'll show how to export the particles and import them as nParticles so you can create a poly surface and render.

Ionic Collisions with Animated Objects

Hi! This is the first test of Maya's OpenCL plugin, Ionic (temp name, if you have a cool idea for a name for the plugin I'd love to hear it!) colliding with animated objects. The number of particles is around 280k , 200 frames and the sim took around 11 minutes. Sorry for the quality of the video, I guess I'll have to get a Vimeo account as the video I uploaded was supposed to be HD... :)

First Test of Ionic OpenCL Maya plugin running the SPH solver

Hi, this is the first test of Ionic, my DEM/SPH Plugin for Maya. 300 frames, the simulation took around 11 minutes, 335k particles, too slow yet. The SPH Solver is of course not as fast as the DEM because the mathematics behind are a bit more complex, but again, it's still not optimized at all. I will spend some time improving collisions with animated objects and making a cool user interface. Later on I'll optimize both solvers and I'm thinking about adding Bullet Rigid Body two way interaction, I already did a Bullet plugin for Maya so I have half of the work done, just need time! :O) Cheers! Tony

New SPH/DEM Maya GPU Solver

Hi! It's been a long time since I updated the blog :) Lately I've been working with openCL and developing a new particle solver for Maya. This video shows the first test of the DEM solver. As you can see it's pretty fast, it can move at good rate more than half a million particles, and even with one million is going pretty well. There's still some room for improvement as it's not yet optimized. For example, I'm not even sorting the particles yet. I'm finishing now the SPH solver so it will be able to simulate liquids soon, I'll keep you posted. All the videos are running using a Nvidia GTX 670. Hope you like it! :)

New Newton video

Hi,

I´m implemented soft bodies and cloth for Newton so now you can see everything working together. There still a long way to go, I have to add ropes, constraints and a million more features :)
I´m not sure when I´ll realease as I´m going to be really busy next month. Anyway, I´ll try to finish an usable version as soon as possible.
Cheers!

Newton for Maya

Hi!

This is the first demo of my implementation of Bullet Physics inside Maya.

Right now is just working with Rigid Bodies but I´m planning to add constraints, soft bodies, cloth and ropes before the end of month.
I´ll release as a free Maya plugin and probably, if I have the time, for Houdini too.

Cheers!

CPU - DEM Simulation

Hi!!

This is my first attempt for a CPU based DEM (discreet elements method) simulator ( more info here: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch29.html )

It's based on a Nvidia demo I saw running with the GPU, It was really cool, so I tried to do the same but with the CPU and multithreaded. Of course is not so fast as the GPU version, but it´s not too bad. 100000 particles - 18 fps.
Note that the drawing is not optimized at all, so it´s much slower when I draw spheres. Probably it could be used for a sand simulation or something like that. I made tests at around 1fps with one million particles. I'm now writing a plugin for Houdini.
Cheers!!

Realtime Raytracer

Hi, I wrote a very simple GLSL raytracer. Just spheres, ground and sky, with refraction and reflection. Not too much to explain, you can control de number of bounces, the IOR (index of refraction), the light direction and that's all!
I'm thinking about extending it to triangle meshes (I hate triangles...), global illumination and all the real good stuff, so... no more realtime :D And GLSL with my ATI is giving me some really stupid problems with arrays, so I'm not sure if GLSL is the way to go for a bigger project...
Anyway, hope you like it!

Realtime fractal raytracing

Hi! I'm back with another video showing a couple of new features.
- Dynamic lighting, now you can adjust the lighting manually as you can see in the video. The shadows are raytraced too so they adjust in realtime.

- Now there's a parameter to set the power (n) of the formula z->z^n+c so you can get different versions of the fractal as showed in the video.

- Frame rate is vastly improved, now all the work is passed to the GPU, including the render plane and ray direction computations.


Some tech data:
- The lighting is a mix of a simple lambert model with a orbit trap that simulates occlusion. Although it's not real occlusion or global illumination, seems to work ok.

- The normal of the surface is computed by central differences.

- The Raymarching is still basically brute force. But with a first step to compute the intersection with a sphere surrounding the fractal.

I'm thinking about putting this tool available for download. I'll add a couple of things and probably next week you can download it from this blog. Hope you like it!! :)

GPU Raytracer

Hi!
it's been a long time since the last update, but my neurons were quite busy with Avatar, so programming at home was out of the question. Anyway, I'm back again with something different. Some weeks ago I read that someone had found a nice way to use the famous z->z^n+c formula in 3D to render something like the classic Mandelbrot fractal in three dimensions, you can find more info here: Mandelbulb . So I decided to give it a shot with the gpu and this is what I have, this time with n=8.
Remember that this is not a 3D Texture, or a polygon mesh so it's not the fastest thing in the world, basically for two reasons, my graphic card is not so great and I didn't use a Distance Estimator, so it's pure raymarching and iterating the mandelbrot function every step. Even with that limitations, it runs at interactive rates. I'll work to improve the framerate. Hope you like it!