SAN FRANCISCO – Autodesk (autodesk.com) has announced a feature-rich update to Bitfrost that’s targeted at simplifying the creation and delivery of complex simulations and custom effects via realtime tool feedback and a host of new enhancements.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Lee Griggs
New virtual sliders allow fluid ports to be adjusted in realtime with dynamic constants and F-curves to be edited live. With feedback port preservation, artist simulations stay intact during graph edits, pausing and unpausing, while the ability to edit live simulations shortens time between iterations.
Broken Bifrost graphs can now be fixed with unknown nodes. Users can now also merge JSON files into single large files, which facilitates faster loading in as little as two seconds. Faster loading further improves time to first pixel in the first Arnold render in a session.
Artists can now use fields and arrays to directly drive simulation parameters, making simulation graphics more expressive, readable and artistically directable. Aero’s post-simulation now only requires a single connection, simplifying refinement workflows. The required data can be cached with the volume to perform a post-simulation refinement from disk, without the original simulation scene. This update has also improved MPM Cloth performance and simulation stability, as well as animation cloth and shell properties.
Maya’s viewport display of adaptive volumes features significant enhancements, and volume adaptivity can now be accessed on simulation compounds to improve performance for input meshes that require conversion. Non-adaptive volumes also now use the adaptive algorithm for accelerated conversions.
The Alembic integration now supports writing and reading for more Bifrost user data and corrects the handling of quarternions and matrices. Bugs with writing OpenVDB have also been corrected for a more robust interaction with the ecosystem of OpenVDB readers and writers, and sparse OpenVDB files can be converted to adaptive Bifrost volumes.
With steady improvements since the initial release, terminals are now out of beta and ready for production. Terminals now also work in loops, enabling each iteration to add geometry to a scene.
Bifrost is available for all Maya users. To download the latest Bifrost extension for Maya, visit: https://area.autodesk.com/bifrost/downloads/.