Image Sequence Based Fluid Emmision

[gc-redvision-co-uk]

I have been writing a MEL script to emit fluids from an Image Sequence. I have found two ways to do it with some very cool looking effects.

I initially used a for loop to cycle through the rows and columns of a 2D fluid grid. colorAtPoint was used to read the image sequence and then I used setFluidAttr to set the voxel. This works fine and is very controllable. The only problem is that it gets very slow to execute, especialy with larger grids.

I have also found that you can set the voxels using: artImportAttrMapCB artFluidAttrCtx ("C:/test/test." +$fr +".tga") "image";

This way works much faster but has its own drawbacks as it eats more and more memory every frame.

Does anyone know of any other fast ways I can do this?
Is there any way to flush out the memory?

Thanks

Graham

[christianmassyn]

Good question would love to get an useful answer also used colorAtPoint to control a panel of lights with a image looks great and works with great ease but speed does became a problem and can imagine the problem getting much worse with fluids

[joojaa]

not with mel. Use the api.

[gc-redvision-co-uk]

Yes, it could be done through the API. Although I have never done any scripting beyond MEL, so I dont know where to start!

[joojaa]

Well technically using the api is no longer script*. Its just that there's a clear architecture in place that makes it, hard to get into before you understand why architecture exists at all. But even so this kind fo stuff is NOT something you should eb doing to begin with mel.

Its just not meant for mel to process data in this manner. one should create a new api node to do the job for you.

*although one could say its all the same. But this is definitely something for the guys that are educated to be programmers, or have equal know how. Hire a TD.

[gc-redvision-co-uk]

Do you know any good books/tutorials on learning to program the API?

Ta

Graham

[joojaa]

QUOTE(graham_c @ 02/17/09, 04:12 PM) [snapback]301056[/snapback]
Do you know any good books/tutorials on learning to program the API?

No*. It wouldn't help much either. Since they would need to be themselves on op of atlast a 3 year degree in computer science. You could go to http://www.robthebloke.org/ for a quick primer but that kindof requires you to know programming quite well already. It doesnt deal in much how you get to the point where you can design the bits yourself. Also read the new to maya api in the api section.

But yes there's no guarantee of any faster functionality in the api, its just thet the loveleval acces can grant you soem better algorithimic options.

*I have read a few not many of them, most would not even come t play at this pointt in time.

PS: the devkit has a example on how to read massive quntities of texture data on fly.