Realtime GPU smoke simulation

I really like how quickly this is moving forward. Well done!

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I wondered whether you had considered:

  • Loopable volumes (e.g. to make a looping oil fire, allowing for continuous volume effects off a mimimal VDB representation on-disk)
  • ‘Start from this state’, allowing the initialization of a volume with a certain state (which might actually be needed for the loopable volumes, perhaps).

The second thing is work in progress, however loopable volumes at this state are not possible to create because of how the simulator works (at least I have no idea at this point how to do this). I plan however some heavy rewrites after the initial state is done so maybe then there will be an option to make more artistic simulations

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Hi, I dont know if it is too early to mention stuff like that. I hope you dont mind.
i asked you on youtube about the interface scaling, because i have a monitor with 1650x1080. I tried the interface scaling and it only affects the font. the windows stay the same. Which is fine, i only have to do it the first time i start the programm. Another thing i noticed is that if i change one value of the domain resolution the other two values change relative to that. I dont know it that is intentional.

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Hi, I have some ideas for supporting lower resolution screens however needs some time to implement this. And with changing the domain values it’s intentional as there is a memory limit on the GPU and I wanted the user to not be restricted by a constant max x/y/z value

Ok, thank you. It`s so much more fun, when you see changes you make in realtime. Mantaflow is nice and not that slow, but when you are not so experienced it can take forever to create the look you want. I was hoping for quite some time, that someone picked that up. So thank you again, and if you have a patreon i would be happy to support you.

Hi michal,

What about nvidia domainless FLIP in realtime ?
https://people.csail.mit.edu/kuiwu/gvdb_sim.html

Maybe this will help you.
It was done by technicians from WETA and Dreamworks already 2018 :smiley:

It has NO domains, NO slowdown, and realtime calculation and SKINNING!
This is crazy!

It was done with Nvidia GVDB:
NVIDIA GVDB Voxels - Samples | NVIDIA Developer.

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Hi,
Thank you :smiley: I’ll take a look on it. For now I had a lot to do with exams on my University and now I’m planning to do some research to make the simulator much faster that it is now. And this papers should definitelly help so maybe I would be able to learn from it and implement something in my simulator.

Again big thanks for this resources
Have a nice Day :blush:

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This is amazing because you don’t have to develop so much from scratch.
The Nvidia GVDB is open source on GitHub.
Because its already developed, WETA and DreamWorks and ILM build on it.
You can literally have no domains.
The baking is zero, due to the nature of the automatic skinning in GPU.
This could work inside Eevee / Cycles with realtime meshing and some billions of particles.
It’s crazy.

Ok all the best. You’re my personal hero if you can make this happen.
:raised_hands::gem:

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Hmmm, the meshing part is especially cool. I think I’ll need to implement JFlow into blender much faster, but it’ll take some time cuz it’s a lot to learn.
But why not :smiley:

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Is this awesome project still in development?

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Yes, however now I have so much other work that I have no time for that but I’ll continue the development hopefully soon

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Great. :smiley:
Thank you for your hard work and good luck with your university projects/exams.

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Just curious about this project. Any current plans to enhance it further?

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I read somewhere that GPU is coming to mantaflow. I can be wrong though.

Here it is, it is maintained by Sebastián Barschkis
Fluid Mantaflow GPU

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This is so frustrating. Mantaflow is in a completely broken, unusable state due to completely broken update system, where many changes do not properly update simulation, yet we are getting a whole new GPU support with last commit Sep 13?

It totally escapes me how a developer can keep working on a giant new features to a system and at the same time constantly refuse to fix bugs which make the said system literally unusable:
⚓ T77170 Mantaflow smoke preview will not update till domain settings are changed ← This has been reported almost year and a half ago!

I honestly think Mantaflow should be flat out removed from Blender if such conduct continues, because right now it serves as a trap for users who may assume that Blender actually has fluid simulation capabilities, while in reality that can not be used properly.

This would be okay if this was someone’s personal Blender branch, but we are talking about a feature bundled in official Blender releases, which should be production ready (There’s no beta sticker on it). One thing is if the developer would not be aware of the issues. But actual active refusal to fix issues of this extent, which invalidate the entire feature, is just crazy.

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YeaH, I think we should just make some noise about this. Because it is very frustrating this issue is still around.

The whole everything nodes with the focus on simulation is the perfect opportunity to make noise about Mantaflow’s issues

yeah, there’s not even a mantaflow user feedback post