Maya 2018: Bifröst Fluids

Render realistic animated liquids in Maya with the Bifröst fluid dynamics engine and the Arnold renderer.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Using the exercise files

1. Simulating a Liquid

• Meeting prerequisites
• Understanding Bifrost
• Choosing Bifrost options
• Setting scene preferences
• Laying out the scene
• Emitting liquid from a mesh
• Selecting Bifrost nodes in the Outliner
• Analyzing the simulation in the Node Editor
• Pushing liquid with a Motion Field
• Colliding with objects

2. Fine-Tuning a Liquid Simulation

• Culling particles with a Killplane
• Tuning time steps
• Tuning transport steps
• Adding friction and drag with a motion field
• Enabling optional Bifrost channels

3. Caching and Meshing

• Writing a user cache
• Reading and disabling a user cache
• Meshing the particles
• Caching a mesh to BIF files
• Exporting to Alembic
• Referencing an Alembic mesh
• Setting an initial state
• Advanced caching with cache control

4. Shading a Liquid

• Displaying channel data as particle color
• Displaying channel data as mesh vertex color
• Rendering a liquid polygon mesh in Arnold
• Rendering the shape node in Arnold
• Rendering meshed voxels
• Accessing available Bifrost channels
• Shading with Bifrost channels using aiUserData
• Remapping Bifrost channel data
• Converting velocity to a grayscale float
• Combining Bifrost channel data
• Building a layered shader
• Mapping specular roughness

5. Simulating Foam

• Generating foam from a liquid
• Adjusting foam attributes
• Caching foam
• Rendering foam in Arnold
• Shading a foam surface with Density

Conclusion

• Next steps