Dreamscape is still good as it stands right now and is a great production tool, however the Ocean component I personally have found most useful and having used different ocean setups over the years, here's a wishlist of features I'd like to suggest for the future:

1. Mental Ray Displacement - first off, it would be very valuable to leverage MR's displacement capabilities. The procedural mesh is very useful, but it would be more efficient to have the option of rendering the ocean either as a high poly procedural object as it currently stands, or have a switch in the object that removes the point displacement and instead passes it to a displacement shader. There are times when either is more beneficial than the other, but as it stands the only way is via a procedural mesh. Ideally it would be nice if the procedural mesh could display a low resolution representation of the swells in the viewports, but at render time the displacement adds the finer details. The reason for this being it would be much easier to reference a lower poly object for emitting particles from and doing so from an ocean surface often doesn't require exacting detail.

2. Mental Ray Physical Sky Integration - I'd like to see the Atmospheric portion introduced as a MR shader so that the standard DS workflow can continue into the MR environment. Mental Ray is here to stay in 3dsmax and it has so many advantages over the scanline renderer at this point that it's almost limiting to be confined to the scanline renderer and it's single sample point per pixel methodology. On detailed oceans we always end up having to super-sample and filter maps into the distance and a raytracer tends to be more accurate and efficient at this. Also, motion blur is superior in Mental Ray and other raytracers.

3. Ocean Wave Enhancements - over the years I have used several different ocean toolkits, most of which were based on the Tessendorf algorithms, but some were more production useful than others. A few things that have stood out that I'd love to see added to DS are ocean wide value masking, wave matrix warping, and increased Grid Size. Ocean Wide Value Masking is a way of applying a noise mask to wave values over a large area. The specific reason for this is to create calm areas within the wave matrix, particularly seen in relatively calm seas. It also has the added benefit of helping to break up any tiling artifacts. Wave Matrix Warping addresses that issue directly by introducing a very large, low frequency distortion of the wave matrix, again helping to disrupt tiling artifacts. Lastly, we're no longer working on dual Pentium 400s with 512MB of RAM, so I think it's safe to say we'd like the option of using larger Grid Sizes than 1024x1024.

4. Map Output - I'd like the option of being able to render the resulting wave displacement/heightfield as an animated sequence of images. More importantly, I'd like to have some way of doing the same with the "stress points" that trigger foam, the purpose of which would be to emit particles for spray elements.

5. Render Element support - integration into MR *should* help facilitate this. Ideally productions will want the ability to generate separate diffuse, specular(glitter), reflection, z-depth and atmospheric passes properly with DS.

I know none of this is easy to implement and probably is quite time consuming. I'm just bringing it up based on my own production experience in the hopes that it will be a useful direction as the software further evolves.

Hey folks, it's been quite some time since I worked with MAX and DS. I'm currently doing some R&D work with it and it's looking great, however there still seems to be a tiling issue when doing wide shots of the sea surface. While working on "Flags of Our Fathers" we ran into the same problem with our Houdini-based ocean setup and what seemed to resolve the tiling issue was adding global surface distortion to the points after being displaced by the wave generator. This was large scale and very low frequency and only required a very slight amount to perturb the wave pattern across the surface to prevent any tiling artifacts.

Just hoping we will see something like this in the future with DS. I also imagine Mental Ray support of the atmospherics and materials is a common request.

Hi guys,
I was wondering if there is another way to access some FFX properties by script.
.castShadows and .receiveshadows in Fuel parameters are not affected in any way.

I've got the same problem with some AferBurn properties but nobody knows the answer.

regards,
Bandu

Hey all. Im new to this forum and posting my first problem/issue

We¨re doing a big production where I work and im gonna need quite a few rough-sea shots. Thing is this... Im really pleased with the way my sea is looking now, got a nice and choppy kinda north-sea looking animation, but really want to use mental ray to render this. And this is where the problem enters : I cant get the foam to map correctly on my mental ray shader. It seems the dreamscape foam shader, that is only available in scanline mode is supplying som kind of coordinates/uv and since this shader cant be used in MR im very unsure on how to deal with this problem. Ive tried applying a planar UVmap and its looking pretty good, but the foam doesnt match the waves any more and its really hard to match by hand. Any ideas on how to solve this issue? Any help will be received with alot of gratitude.

/Breuer

Can someone please clarify what's the connection/difference between the:
- up to simulation size at the general tab in grid settings
- up to rendering size at the general tab in grid settings
- memory used / cached during simulation - in the simulation window
- and final frame cache file on HDD

Also which of these do I have to accommodate with RAM - I mean which of these tells me how much RAM I need and if I don't the simulation will crash?

- also what is the difference between a snapshot and "ability to stop/continue"

hi guys i have simulated fume on single pc
now i need to network render how can i import the sim data back in fume or i have to simulate on every pc again

naveed

I'm running into an issue with 2008/64 bit Fume 1.1.

Simulations are terminating with a simple 'Simulation Terminated' in the status window. Its not running out of ram, or diskspace. It just seems to stop.

Second, although I have 'ability to stop/continue' and write a snapshot every 10 frames, NO FDCs are being created, unless I explicitly hit stop. This of course, does me no good if the sim quits randomly.

Anyone else having issues like this, or have any suggestions?

I'm writing a script that helps me change some AfterBurn values simultaneously for all my AfterBurns in the scene but get no access to .RenderType
It seems to work on every other parameters like .ProbingStepMultipler or .colorsUsed for example but not on RenderType.
Thats sad, as this is very important

AB 4.0b x64

[EDIT]

ok, the next question would be about accessing the color values in the gradients...
The first color gradient in Color rollout has index 2 and after Reset() there are 2 keys.. 0 and 1 with color 255 255 255
now, I can add keys with the color I want but how do I change this two keys that can not be deleted?
there is only a GetKeyColor but no SetKeyColor

.AddKey [0,255,0] makes the first key green but at this moment there are 3 color keys. key0 is till white, key1 is green and on top of key0, "old" key1 becomes key2.
The solution for the moment is to adding a key at pos. 0.99999 but that is not the real thing...
Any solution to edit the key color?
Or maybe I just miss something?

[EDIT]
[EDIT2]

.RMLimit can not be set via script as well.

[EDIT3]

regards,
Bandu

Hi everybody,

we are curently looking for a experienced Fume FX Artist for an VFX Feature Film Production. We are hiring now. The required work should be finished in one or two weeks. Our company is based in Germany. Please send a mail if you are interested in and we can talk about more Details. jobs at 3dmaximal dot com

Regards,

The FumeFX 1.2 UI button that brings up the floating window is now working. The complete uninstall and reinstall of FumeFX worked.