Simulation - explosions, fluids, etc

[nat-critterpix]

well, i dunno anything about particle simulation. from some of the samples in xsi, it seems like I need like 10000 particles to create any nice explosions/ fire/ smoke simulation?? i tried simulating 5000 over 100 frames takes a while already with my old p3... Does it require so much cpu power to preview simulations in real time?

i tried out different kind of simulations in xsi & i have no idea how use it to complete an animation
for most simulations, the biggest obstacle is the slow preview. in xsi, simulations require time to recaculate & hard disk to cache after i make any changes... for simulations more than couple thousands particles, it takes so long to start & finish. & it takes forever (or never ) to complete if I enable radiosity with hair, particles, etc.
anywayz < sigh >

after couple tests, hair & cloth seems rather stable with dynamics & such and renders fine. yet if I want to apply them to character animation for student reel, would that be a good idea in terms of the effectiveness & time? Well, I don't want to bother with them if they take lotz of time to tweak & would increase the render time dramastically.

oh, btw, how is xsi weaker than houdini in particle fx? Can I generate any kind of effects out there with xsi alone?

there are several 3d/2d standlone/plugin particle system out now. will we have a particle simulator in the fx tree someday?

[rickw]

ZKG,

Dunno if this helps but we do everything in passes.

We come from a Maya background where we had per particle attributes and rigid body dynamics. Well you don't have that yet in XSI. (keyword yet.......I hope

Anyways here's how we tackle a complex simulation.

First we decide what the shot needs to see...not the environment and we work with it on a per shot basis.

If I need particles to shoot out, hit a wall and then slide down the camera and them morph into a Jedi Knight. It's planned out and then done in seperate passes and then composited in post.

I totally hear ya about how slow the calculation is when it comes to simulations. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

In the end there is no perfect package but....we can get XSI to do what we want:)

For the slow calculations we are thinking about using primitave objects. A good example would be to simulate rigid body dynamics with softbodies and then hopefully we can bake out the simulation and export the function curves which should be able to be imported and applied to any mesh....but this is just theory. I'll know for sure once I have time to play with it.

Good Luck

[nat-critterpix]

thanks!
Putting the simulation in different pass is a good idea indeed.

@....we can get XSI to do what we want:)
i trust you on that. =) i'll explore more into xsi's simulation then... Well, I guess the slow calculation in xsi is alright if the other package suffer the same problem as well. If so, i just need a faster computer...

I just wanna make sure xsi is capable of creating & rendering visual fx well enough. anywayz, thanks again!