emFluid4 – 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 32 bit and 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.
54 seconds of test-renderings using the alpha version of emFluid4, the successor of emFluid3.
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”.
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