I´m a bit in the dark as to what will happen for some kind of future plugin, host or standalone turbulenceFD version for Lightwave 2019 and forward?
Last update was…
v1.0 Rev 1439
2018-12-11
And I reckon that phase and plugin is not longer developed? but has changed to another direction with it working differently?
Please, I would like to have some more insight on this, and also if any new version would work with the newer volumetrics PBR in Lightwave 2019?
The Lightwave version of the plugin is still being maintained like the C4D version is. The C4D host and SDK has simply required more maintenance updates during the last year.
There will also be a major new feature release. The dev time that went into it is indeed long. That’s mostly because it’s not just an incremental upgrade, but a significant expansion of its scope. I’m hoping we can start previewing the new release relatively soon. There is going to be an open beta phase during which we can also discuss specific features.
BTW - a way to render TFD results with LW’s new volumetrics is to convert TFD’s cache to VDB using the bcf2vdb tool and load those back into LW. Of course this extra step is not a permanent solution for future versions.
Thank you jascha, good to know…I will keep my eye on it.
The workaroun of converting to vdb is a no no for me, due to the work behind it, and also quality and renderspeed issues with vdb, and the fact that it will always be non changable after the conversion.
Previous versions of TFD has´t met up to what I require, partly missing the particle advection, but also important things like weight map emission, and no fire and smoke openfl at the same time, that only exists as either smoke or fire.
The multiscattering was very slow and recalculates each little tweak, and I had a lot of crashes when tweaking the shader curves.
Thus so it has come to the point that I´ve been focusing more on blender fluids, which allows for weight paint ( partly also because the weight paint is better in blender) and it can use that as emission source.
Blender also have both fire and smoke presented in openGL, unlike TFD.
Another aspect is that the blender forces that is used to push the fluids, will also push particles, and it will also push dynamics such as cloth or rigid bodies etc, this is not the case with TFD, neither can it´s forces affect lightwave particles, or bullet dynamics, neighter can Lightwaves bullet forces or old legacy forces affect the fluids, so there is a constant mismatch between the Lightwave fluid dynamics, it´s legacy dynamics, and newer bullet dynamics.
This is something you off course have no controll over, just wanted you to know where I see issues, where it in fact is a bit relevant also to workflows including fluids.
That said, somethings TFD is doing better, seems to simulate much faster at higher resolutions, better convectional and turbulence control overall, easier to use textures to controll channels, I especially like the option to use multilayer procedurals with varied modes set, so I can get varied cloud height raising when doing such stuff, this is something that I do not find how to do in blender.
Ive´been writing on the old forums, never got any answers on my later post…so I kind of lost interest and trust in the development of TFD, but glad to see it continued.
It all depends on how Lightwave itself develops, a big part of me that has driven me to using blender more and more, is also the fact I have both CPU and GPU…and the GPU render in blender is quite decently fast,
if it at some point goes out of memory because of to high resolution, short volume step rate, then I just switch to the CPU, the point is that I at least can get fast feedback at a decent volume step with while tweaking the shaders in blender.
Blender is also now in experimental mode with a mantaflow branch, but that one I am not comfortable with, difficulties clearing cache and some other issues.
So…still a little interest of TFD, my first points would be…
That´s my input.
Good Luck on the development.
/Michael
Do you have a price point for upgrading to the new version?
Thanks,
Mark
Prices are still TBD