Fluidity - NextGen Fluid Dynamics - [ RELEASED ]

Thats awesome Alex!!!

 

Oh my goodness this is wonderful. Especially for Unity it's impressive, but outside of Unity I haven't seen this in games.

Question:

Is it resource intensive?

Does the smoke react to a rigid body character touching it? For example, simply having a character run through the smoke, would the smoke disperse, repel, whip around the character as the two collide?

I presume "yes" because the demo has the smoke colliding with the walls of an invisible cube.


Does it react to wind?

This is great. So much potential. Really would love to know what kind of power hog this is or isn't. It truly looks like real world particles of ash reacting randomly to each other. It could be a volcano, dry ice vapour, rolling fog, anything. So much potential.

 

In my experience you can pite far, i my 'heavy' software in my projects, fluidity is one of the lightest, althugh I have a lot to learn naturally, its ooking like 4am is coming round and i'm still generating terrain! i will get to this! Alex if you dare send me updates as they come regarding fumes and their behaviour (cohesion, persistent and wot not) i should be getting very much handy enough to integrate it straight into the volcano. I'm already looking forwards if possible to have different shaped emitters within the caldera making differekinds of explosions, some of various olours, colours changing over tome almost especially light scattering from within as well as outside as magma explosed

Asking a lot i know! But this could be used for anything, even how magnesium burns

Incense sticks too fr that matter too, but of a hippy over here

 

thats what i wanted to see ))

 

I was so excited i can hardy even read the above post

 

Yeah, currently sphere colliders are supported (although I'm looking at adding mesh/planar colliders next).

And turbulence zones are supported (for wind).

It's definitely a power hog on full quality, but with fully customizable quality settings and LOD helpers it's easy to tune to your needs.

 

I'm still awake trying to get this figured out as nicely as i'd like it! Thank god for coffee. Although i am now kaput, and hopefully tonight bring fortune cause if i don't sleep then brain death will surely be mine. If you don't mind could you sling me however far you get with the self shadowing smoke in a note? Then i should be able to get it all in, although it's already looking great. Sorry for taking so long, mind.

 

That's it finished, I'm going to submit that tonight, and leave scope for further scattering in the future.

What was this you were talking about a page ago, with the CUDA filter??

 

Ahh I see! I think the only thing I can think of with issue with my needs i'd actuallu have to see using my own simulation, which i'll basically do now so you can have a look

The shock filter is something i've been puzzling with, because I know its fast on the GPU but I dont know how fast it can be for runtime in a game (Although it seems to handle video fine) but the effect it has is quite brilliant for what i had in mind and being able to use it in a realtime context would be great

It's from a GPU Pro book, here's the software they themselves wrote to explain, based on CUDA https://code.google.com/p/cefabs/

If you play around with the settings on anything you can think of you can see it can be quite a striking effect, the source is there naturally but obviously the paper is kept to the book. Even if I had to pay a few bob for the thing I wouldnt mind so long as it could be implemented in some form, and I fully intend to treat textures with that software anyway for my own development

 

Okeydoke well, not the best video was slow cause i had all the things going on in the bg bu the next evolution of the volcano.

I tried to show the feasibility of persistance by having it run with the reaction time down then turning emit off and on again, such things shouldnt be too terrible to script

 

Yeah I think what you've done there is correct as smoke doesn't rise from the volcano at a constant rate! Looks awesome, will be even better with the new shadowing (which I submitted yesterday).

 

Ahh yep re: constant rate, it seems to be fired a lot by internal explosions so the intention is to have several instances with different properties then i can maybe tend to it's temper or elevate it via scripting, it's supposed to run uninterruptedly for, hoping, 1 1/2 or so hours so being able to control phases and reflect events would be great

As an side, i spent a long time with it to get a nice effect and obv will be spending more too, and you can get some very striking effects with this that don't resemble a volcano at all, or a flame etc, slowed down and messing with the gradient for shading a bit i got some almost haunting results. I see plenty of occasions in the future to use it for things you wouldnt associate by its original intention at all. Its pretty amazing basically

I'll have as look at the update when i can get at it and i'll try put something together that could show off the new updates, in terms of my intended use and perhaps try and re-find some of the more bizarre results

In fact presets along with an ability to capture estate would be ace, but i have a bunch of time now i know what i wanted could be done so i wont nag hah

Finally though, the noise slows it like crazy, i dont know if theres some optimisations there, but i would definitely say being able to introduce it and colours and suchlike on lifetime/energy basis would be great, but no real hurry there. I will post videos of how i get along to maybe sell it to folks

 

Finally I managed to see the new self shadowing fluid . Looks great! And I realized what the problem was that I had with the Text Demo scene and the new Self Shadowing scene:
In my Player Settings I use Forward Rendering but in the old scenes the camera use the Deferred Rendering. The camera in the new scenes uses "Use Player Settings" as Rendering Path. So here is the problem.
I wasn't aware that Fluidity only works in Deferred Rendering It wasn't documented as far as I'm aware (But it should be!!!). Is it a problem to get a version that works also in Forward Rendering?

 

Of course it's not a problem. Fluidity has nothing to do with Unity lighting rendering paths.

What's happened is the depth texture flag isn't enabled for the camera in the scene (likely my fault). In forward rendering the depth texture isn't generated unless you explitly decompress and copy it from the depth buffer. Whereas deferred rendering needs it before lighting can be calculated, so generating it is part of the pipeline.

I'll fix this up ASAP!

 

Yes!

 

Sweet. Most impressive thing I've seen.

So, I just bought the package yesterday. What I want is self shadowing based on point light(s).

I was looking for a solution for ground fog (like, a fog machine) but this could do every particle effect I need that I can think of in my current project.

btw: On the topic of external shadows...Its not so important to me but I would be more than happy to change to whatever system for shadowing if it means you can get this to receive them.

 

I found the self shadowing on the recent update absolutely beautiful and something good will come of that at some point over the next few days (i hope) as i'm going to have a bit of an assets i own showcase to show everyones stuff, this in particular will be getting lust from the gfx people, with a bit of messing around it can look absolutely beautiful

Bug report time though, it seems sometimes when you save a scene i dont know what values its saving for the resolution of the simulation but its very high, and not what is specified. It was neat to see how this would look on the computers of tomorrow (absolutely amazing) but yes, was a bug so i thought i should say

In fact getting it to remember parameters seems to be hard, generally i set the parameters in play mode, copy the component and past values after stopping it, seems to be the only way for the values to stick sometimes

Let none of this detract though, this is amazing

 

Interesting bug report. I've seen similar problems like this in Unity when you have the gameobject that's also a prefab else where. Is that the case for you?

As far as I'm aware, I've followed normal practice for editor serialization, maybe you should file a bug report with Unity?

 

You know what, i think not only is it probably that, that i should also know better too by now, i dont think theres much point filing a bug report when the updating the prefab should work fine aha.My bad

As an aside, did you find much of interest in the filter I showed you? I can definitely understand lack of enthusiasm if it doesnt interest you but I figured i'd throw it your way. There are several other image space techniques and filters in the books I suggested that share a similar theme on interesting 'content aware' kind of techniques that can have a dramatic and pleasing effect on an image (The gpu kuwahara filter being another), and theres nothing really to lose from wrapping them up into a product and making some money! (Not to mention me finding them very useful. Hah)

You give me volcanos, i give you pretty filters, and on that subject i'm getting increasingly close to a very strong volcano effect that renders all my feature-nagging kind of silly. If you set the reaction time to very low and slow down the simulation to very low, you can get a very convincing approximation of a volcano where if you bump up the gravity influence, you end up with exactly the sort of persistent mist i was looking for. A high gravity influence not only nicely removes energy from the simulation realistically, in a volcano plume sense, but naturally dissipates the cloud. Havent tried using an effector on the mist to introduce wind effects and suchlike but I think you've made some kind of definitive volcano simulator aha. You should rename this thing 'VOLCANOS (but does fluids too)'

Edit: Edited cause what i thought was a problem, wasnt a problem

 

Hello, I was just checking in to see where Fluidity's at nowadays (it's been a while and so I've had to switch back to more classical particle-based solution for Ghost of a Tale). The new self-shadowing web player demo looks very nice so I updated Fluidity to the latest version and tried opening the example scenes. However they don't seem to really work for me. Well, more precisely here's what happens:

_Affector Demo: The blue flame effect is the only effect that seems to work normally; the other flames are really short, almost like sprites.

_Jet Demo: The effect doesn't seem to work; I can see a little distortion playing with the slider but the flame effect is not present.

_Nuclear Demo: Nothing visible (besides the architectural meshes).

_Ruins Demo: When entering play mode the flames effect appears for one frame then disappears; only the lights are visible.

_Self Shadowing Demo: Nothing visible; just a black screen.

_Text Demo: I can shoot projectiles by left-clicking but the fluidity effect is not visible.

_Volume Renderer Demo: Seems to work as I remembered from the previous version.


I'm on Windows 8, Unity's in Linear color space, I'm using DX 11 and I tried both in Deferred and Forward rendering mode. I also made sure to update to the latest version of Unity and did a clean install of Fluidity.

Oh well. Good luck for the development and I'll keep on checking regularly! Can't wait to be able to use it in game!

 

Hey Seith,

I'm having the same problem. It appears as though the Volume Renderer script(kind of important heh) wasn't included in the latest update? I can't find it anywhere and there's nothing attached to the camera components in the demo scenes.

@smb02dunnal Please repackage and upload the asset for us

 

It's not really that important. If you had read the older posts about the latest update, you'd know that it's no longer needed

Why?

 

Interesting...

It's not something I'm seeing on my end! Which can only mean it's one of two things; your project/settings aren't correct, or there is a bug in Unity itself.

I've got to admit though, it sounds an awful lot like you have just installed Fluidity over the top of the old one and are rendering using the old shader...

Could you create a fresh project and import Fluidity to test it?

 

I'm not sure what's going on then :/ Fresh project, everything enabled. Still getting the same issues as Seith.

 

Can you send me the fresh project, maybe I'll be able to help!

 

To be fair the latest release didnt have documentation for the new features (although i understand writing documentation is a chore), and i'm not sure all the demo scenes were updated to behave consistently between them, like different rendering paths (well basically player settings or deferred) which was a bit confusing

That said after getting used to it perfectly well, im finding overlarge resolutions for the simulation can be a bit crashy but you dont really need resolutions like that

Been getting a tad obsessed with this lat few days cause i really want the volcano perfect,omly thing really buggering that is if youre using quite high values for vorticity and viscous parameters then the emiting can look a bit hectic, theres ways round though and the final result of the afternoon really had me impressed - left it to conform with the boundary but be large enough an effect to spread along the 'ceiling' and the sunlight passing through gaps in the 'umbrella', illuminating the central pillar, that was special stuf. Bit burned out on it till after some sleep but i think im getting close to getting exactly what i want, so cheers! If i had only one tinybugbear there was as the fluid reached the top of its bounds it would 'umrella' in a way i found really nice but tended not to do it consistenly, but rather 'pulse'

I don't really 'get' the issues others are having though, so long as dx11 is on its all dandy

You go t me enthused in the idea of it shadowing the ground now, that would be a sight to see, and i'll show off a final result (im fairly sure it will look pretty nice) soonish, just want to promo a lot of guys stuff at the same time, thats said if you wanna see progress ill make a video when im more conscious

 

Ok, so I tested Fluidity on an empty project and after I set the project's rendering path to Deferred the self-shadow example scene worked fine (it was pink in Forward mode, as you know).

So I got back to my game's project and (again) deleted the Fluidity folder from the Assets directory. Then I imported Fluidity, making sure the project settings were the same as the empty one (in terms of DX11 and rendering path) but it still doesn't work.

Which probably means one thing: the previous version of Fluidity might have left something somewhere (outside of the Fluidity folder) which interferes with the new version. Would you have any idea what that could be, Alex?

 

There's nothing outside of the Fluidity folder. Are you using linear space lighting? There seems to be a problem with that.

 

Yes, here are my project's settings:



Are there settings anywhere else that need to be changed?

 

Ah, there's a bug with linear lighting and Forward rendering in this version of Fluidity. I fixed them both late last evening. Sorry about that!

 

Oh, well I guess we'll just wait for the next version to show up on the Asset Store then... Thanks.

And since Lazygun was mentioning the lack of API documentation; is that something you're working on implementing at the moment?

 

....

 

Just submitted an update to the store. Fixes the bugs with forward rendering and linear colour space!

 

Lovely! Will get on that soon. As said I want to show off all these assets i'm accruing in a very nice way and that will definitely help

 

I recently read Patapom's (the creator of Nuaj) paper on realtime volumetric rendering and wondered how much relevance you might think it could have to this (i'm imagining, in fact, that it's already using it to a degree for self shadowing and density, for ground shadows i have something in a book i might try to implement as i also found a really nice start to advanced article on shadow mapping), one thing it covers is using fractional brownian motion, which seems to suit the noise type i was wondering about when using it to add detail to the volume, using a lower frequency 3d texture to break up tiling and wondered your thoughts on this too. I'm going to stop asking for stuff and try it myself as its about time i did that sort of thing and you've provided all the tools needed, i suppose i just wondered if i'm going in the right direction

I'll add that i'm absolutely loving this, it's starting to do exactly what I want it to do and will be starting to script it for behaviour so the main plume and several instances can nicely emulating a churning ash belching volcano, it's looking beautiful and it's also running much more quickly than I thought it would, 200-300fps while showing impressive detail even up close, just finding the noise breakup a bit unsuitable as it tiles very obviously and by animation i guess i meant more if the noise has a 'phase' or something similar, rather like max's fractal and turbulence noise, rather than animating its offset

 

sorry if this has been covered.. is it possible to attach a volume to a moving object, with an attached emitter?
I want to have an object emmit fluid as it moves but having a huge room volume seems expensive.
Most important is that the fluid moves realistically, the fluid trailing behind. I replicated what was done in the demo but it looked odd.
It doesn't really move as if the fluid is moving in space, its like space shrunk down to fit the fluid, not allow ing much dynamic behavior.
Does that make sense? Also, whats more expensive, multiple volumes or a big room volume?

 

Wow, the flametrower and the pyroclastic cloud are probably the most AAA A A + stuff I've seen for unity.

 

Certainly. See how I set up the flamethrower demo for this. In Fluidity we call this concept translating grids.

 

I updated to the latest version and am having issues...The fluid draws all wrong, its offset and draws in front of everything else, mesh included. I'm using it with the Rift..it clips off the entire fluid as I move my head..
The only version Ive been able to get tp work correctly with the rift is an old one.

Also, The flamethrower video is brutal. Its so fast with no annotations or speech, very tough to follow along...the viewer has to pause it and track your mouse. Do you have a demo scene file you could share with the flamethrower as a prefab on on model... doesn't need to be the bots demo. looks amazing, really like to use it in my game as a fire source in the world, not really as a flamethrower.
Thanks!

 

Is it possible to send me a quick repro project?

 

I've added some annotations to the flaming bots tutorial video, you're right it's a bit brutal! Sorry!

 

I updated again from scratch, this time only updating the four files that needed to be, the shaders.
Is that good enough? seems to be working fine

Update: I found the part that breaks it for me when I update it...its almost like it puts the fluid on a plane thats floating in the scene...
Fluidity/Resources/Shaders/fluidity.cginc

 

Here's what I'm seeing, updated on top, working on the bottom... Thanks

 

Okay, just to clarify you have managed to get it working? Or not?

 

yes, If I leave out the shaders: Fluidity/Resources/Shaders/fluidity.cginc
I assume I need these? they weren't listed as new during the update. Yes, Im working, I wanted to be fully updated.

there's an image of how its broken here
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qymwvhxed45roee/broken.jpg

 

What's your method for importing the new version of Fluidity into your project?

 

go to the asset store, update, import, leave everything selected, import.
I also tried throwing out the entire fluidity folder and importing the new version from scratch, same result.

 

Sounds about right. Is it broken only on rift? I don't have one, that's why I was asking you to send me a repro project.

 

Yes, happens without the rift cameras, using a standard cam.

 

Hello, seems you dont like PMs, but the gist of it, regarding Fluidity working with candela was that the candela guys said to me:

From here http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/208...r-Unity/page17

'fluidity is a volumetric effect using DX11 and compute shaders, as we have mentioned, Candela looks at Diffuse Alpha and the Specular Alpha Channels for modulation and Color/Depth Buffer, It is much easier for other third party packages to add custom integration to Candela SSRR than the other way around. Perhaps you can contact the developer of Fluidity to integrate Candela SSRR support. Please note, you can of course still use Candela SSRR toget with Fluidity in the scene however they will not reflect until Fluidity writes it's results to the depth color buffer.'

I am completely ignorant of this magic so i'm not sure how well that goes or if it's necessarily true, it is however a damn shame if these things cant work together. Would you have any response to that, that would help me enlighten them? If not, are there any ideas you have that would get around Candela not reflecting Fluidity? They're both currently somewhat unique products, they're also both extremely good (especially on the eyes), imo, so one way or another i suppose i'll try get them working, apply my brain and wotnot