Good morning everyone.

Today, got myself at work a dual quad core processor with a massive 8 gigs of RAM to simulate and do some R&D for Max 64 bits and the 64 bits version of fumefx. I'm running Max 9 , currently.

My question is simple for those who already experiment with fumefx and 64 bits, what should i asked my System administrator to look at to setup my 3dMax and Fumefx properly? Any special setup needed from 3dMax to used all the resources available? Is Max or fumefx having multithreaded problem that i should be aware of?

I'm doing R&D on smoke moving around a character at high speed and wish i could show them the full power of 64 bits uberness . With the same simulation as before , my system seem to use more PF usage than usual ( more than 2 gig), but the 8 processors seem to clumsily use 15% CPU Usage, only!?

Any informations about your experience on the subject would be appreciated by my fellow system administrator.

Thanks in advance for your patience,

Simon

Hi,

I'm playing around with FumeFX again, doing dry ice (again). I got the feel of the smoke hammered now, and it flows and renders quite nice. However, there's one little thing I'm curious about...

Am I right in assuming that gravity is what pulls smoke upwards, so heavier smoke moves faster? And that buoyancy is a force that stops the smoke from moving too fast (kind of like air resistance). With that in mind I created a gravity helper object, and rotated that upside down, so that the smoke would fall downwards. That worked great. I then wanted the smoke to billow more out/expand, and not necessary rush downwards, so I dropped the gravity to 0.1, and I set the buoyancy to 0.1 as well. However, the smoke keeps going downwards at quite a speed. I could reduce the speed by lowering the Time Scale, but I want the smoke to be expand fast - only not downwards.

Could anybody give me a hint on this, something else I could do to keep the smoke from moving in a direction, just expanding?

Thanks,
Rune

When i change the value of the world Z value and moving to another frame the seasurface is falling back to Z = 0.
Any suggestions ?

Regards,
Ludi

3ds Max 2008 (german localised)
DreamSape 2.5d

How difficult would it be for FFX to simulate between frames on render time in case I use camera MB?

cheers,
Bandu

I don't know if this is a bug, or something else. I have a sim with 250+mb/frame size for the data,and it seems to take a very, very long time to pull up the UI. I can see this if displays are enabled for the sim, but I have the main viewport display disabled, yet it seems to still load the data.. disable the data channel below it (fuel, fire, etc) and it gets speedy again.

tks!

C

OK it's great it's finaly out (too bad we bought AB 3.2 for Max 2008 last weak - talk about bad timing ((( )
Got two questions though, since I couldn't find any info about it in the press release:
- FinalRender GI and Caustics - are they finaly supported AGAIN?
- can AB read proper particle lifespan for PFlow flows or do we still have to set it manualy?

March, 04, 2008

We're pleased to announce that AfterBurn 4.0 is released today.
This will be a $135 upgrade for existing AfterBurn 3.2 users.

Users that have purchased AfterBurn 3.2 after October 1st 2007 are entitled for a free upgrade.
Registered users entitled for a free upgrade shall send us email with their AfterBurn SN# and we
will modify their account.

Here is a short list of what’s new in AfterBurn 4.0:

- New AfterBurn Shadow Map brings a great speed improvement without significant shadow quality loss. Speed improvement over Raytraced Shadows in AfterBurn 3.2 can be more than a factor of five for dynamic scenes and even up to factor of ten for static cloud animations.

- AfterBurn no longer needs special type of shadows to be able to calculate self-shadowing effect as it supports standard light’s interface for atmospheric shadows (light’s “Atmosphere Shadows” option).

- FusionWorks support. AfterBurn will properly blend with FumeFX, ScatterVL Pro and Standard 3ds max Fog. FusionWorks support also brings output to FusionWorks Z-Depth Render Element as well as output to non-clamped colors, used in .exr, or .hdr file formats.

- AFC View is a new workflow improvement that allows users to edit all AFCs and Gradients from one place.

- Geometry Clipping option enables that particles that are contained inside geometry do not render outside of it.

- Completely reworked built in noise types are now in form of a plug-ins for AfterBurn that can also be developed by 3rd parties. New 3D Texture Map allows users to use 3ds max 3D Map as a noise generator inside AfterBurn.

- AfterBurn Daemons user interface is displayed directly inside AfterBurn UI.

- New Cebas’ ThinkingParticles controller that allows using TP’s channels to replace AfterBurn values.

- New max script functionality.


Best regards,

Sitni Sati d.o.o.

Is there a workaround to be able to use the skylight to have the smoke cast shadows in my scene?

There is no atmosphere shadows checkbox in the skylight parameters.

Thanks

It seems that after the new updates I have multiple entries in the "Additional Help" window for all plugins. Checked my plugin.ini but it's fine.
Even stranger the window actually lists help for FumeFx 1.0a along the FumeFx 1.1 but there is no such entry in the plugin.ini.

Has anyone else noticed it? :o

I have a problem here.
I want to create stretching and vortical smoke, like hairlines.
The image file is the WIP sample with opacity AFC settings.
When lines(circles) of the smoke dissipate, they shrink but expand.
I want them to expand and falloff finally.
It looks ok when I increase the buoyancy. But I don`t want the smoke to rise up.
What should I do?