RealFlow⢠Rendering Toolkit
RealFlow™ Rendering Toolkit
(for RenderMan® and mental ray®)
Next Limit Technologies is proud to announce a rendering toolkit for RealFlow™. This toolkit consists of a set of tools that will help
you to undertake the complex task of rendering RealFlow™ fluids. The main aim of these tools is to be able to generate procedural
geometry at render time, in situations where you want a polygonal mesh representation from your fluid particles. We also offer tools
for rendering individual fluid particles and the possibility of using all these tools together.
Throughout the past decade simulation tools like RealFlow™ have been used to achieve realistic animation of fluids. Thanks to the
exponential growth of computation power, these simulations have become more and more realistic, and in the case of RealFlow™
that has meant users having to deal with increasing numbers of particles.
Figure1. Volume subdivision and new state-of-the-art smoothing algorithm.
A typical RealFlow™ workflow consists of creating a fluid simulation and exporting the sequence of files containing the particles.
Those particles represent the fluid. When it comes to rendering, users are usually interested in having a polygonal mesh rather than
particles. This involves another step in the workflow, where the polygonal mesh is generated in RealFlow™ and a sequence of files
containing those polygonal meshes is produced.
This extra step in the workflow creates a significant storage restriction for the polygonal meshes. Another problem arises when
millions of these particles or vertices have to be imported into a standard 3D application for rendering. Usually these applications
cannot cope with such a large amount of data.
The toolkit can help you to overcome the problems described above.
If you have any queries about purchasing the RealFlowTM Rendering Toolkit, or other general
queries, we’d be happy to help.
You can contact us at: salesdesk@nextlimit.com.
Visit us at www.realflow.com
RF4REALFLOW4.3
_fluids & dynamics simulation tool
Copyright © 2008 Next Limit Technologies - All rights reserved.
Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners.
RealFlow™ Rendering Toolkit
FlowMesherTM
FlowMesher™ generates a polygonal mesh from RealFlow™ PD and BIN particle files at render time.
Features:
Volume subdivision to obtain high resolution meshes with millions of polygons.
Mesh generation at render time with configurable parameters.
Realwave meshes can be imported, creating a single mesh with the rest of RealFlow™ particle files.
A new state-of-the-art smoothing algorithm that will improve the fluid-like look of your fluids. This algorithm will be part of the
next major version of RealFlow™ but you can use it now thanks to the toolkit.
Low memory-usage process. It uses only a small amount of memory even for the generation of huge polygonal meshes.
Almost all the memory on your machine will remain available so that the renderer can work without memory constraints.
Motion Blur is configured according to the global setup of the scene.
The properties of the particles can be interpolated to the vertices of the polygonal mesh.
Figure2. Texture from particles interpolated to the vertices of the mesh.
FlowParticlerTM
FlowParticler™ feeds the renderer with particle information from RealFlow™ PD and BIN particle files.
Features:
Generation of points, sprites and spheres at render time with configurable parameters.
The attributes of the particles are attached to these geometry primitives as primitive variables. These attributes can be
accessed and used by the shaders in the renderer.
Motion Blur is configured according to the global setup of the scene.
Particle size relative to camera distance.
Allows random variation of particle size.
Motion Blur is configured according to the overall setup of the scene.
Multi-point technology to increase the number of particles at rendering time. You can use different seeds for different passes
with the same simulation and boost the number of particles
Copyright © 2008 Next Limit Technologies - All rights reserved.
Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners.
RealFlow™ Rendering Toolkit
Toolkit for RenderMan®
This toolkit has been tested with a variety of RenderMan® renderers: PhotoRealistic RenderMan® from Pixar, AIR, 3DLight, Aqsis
and Liquid.
FlowMesher™ (for RenderMan®)
Extra features:
The mesh can be a SubdivisionMesh or a PointsPolygons mesh.
The meshes computed can be exported to RIB files.
The meshes previously computed and exported in RIB format can be loaded on the fly, making the shading process easier
and faster.
Includes a RIB Generator plug-in to allow for compatibility with RenderMan® Artists Tools, and various Mel scripts that make
FlowMesher™ compatible with RenderMan® for Maya Pro. With these plug-ins you can easily include the procedural call
inside your scene.
FlowParticler™ (for RenderMan®)
Extra features:
Same tools as FlowMesher™ to place the procedural call inside the scene.
Sub-volume decomposition for massive particle rendering. Sometimes it is necessary to render millions of particles, but not
all of them intersect the camera projection so some could be ignored (only for RAT).
Figure3a. FlowParticler™ for RenderMan for MayaPro.
Figure3b. FlowMesher™ for RenderMan for MayaPro.
Copyright © 2008 Next Limit Technologies - All rights reserved.
Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners.
Figure4a. FlowParticler™ for RAT.
Figure4b. FlowMesher™ for RAT.
Toolkit for mental ray®
This toolkit functions through mental ray® geometry shaders and can potentially be used by any platform that supports these kinds
of shaders.
FlowMesher™ and FlowParticler™ (for mental ray®)
We provide mental images® mi files to connect easily with Maya. Please see the images below.
Figure5a. FlowParticler™ for Maya.
Figure5b. FlowMesher™ for Maya.
Copyright © 2008 Next Limit Technologies - All rights reserved.
Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners.
