Some questions from a new user looking to purchase

Software Support & Suggestions EmberGen
1

I am a VFX artist and have used FumeFX (oh the time I have wasted) and some Houdini previously. I am loving Embergen after a day of poking around with the trial version. This is something I can definitely see me using for Film and TV projects. I have spent months with FumeFX, tweaking sims to try and get them the way I want and Embergen seems like a god send. I do however have some questions for that I am hoping some of the experienced users make b e able to answer. First of my workflow will most often be an exported VDB into blender where it will be integrated and lit the rendered.

Some questions:

  • Using an RTX 3090 how large a simulation am I able to create?

  • I seem to have hit some limits with creating multicolored Smoke, in other software I was able to add a map to an emitter and the smoke would inherit the color from the image (so multiple different colours could be emitted at once based on for e.g. position}. So far the best i can do is manually add some random color changes to the overall emitter.

  • What limiting factors have others found with the software so far.

  • (For the Devs) I see talk of versions 1 and 2, any heads up on when and what these may bring for Film and TV VFX creators?

Having looked at this I really feel this product is shaping up to be an important part of my toolset, realtime (or close to it) is changing the way I get to create, I think like any tool it takes the right users to get the most of it. I read some comments from Houdini users about how realistic it looks and personally I think Embergen looks pretty spot on so far with the huge upside of having the ability to quickly tweaks settings to push it further.

Love to hear others experiences and thoughts.

Thanks
Kel

2

Hi Kel, terribly sorry about not responding sooner! We appreciate the kind words and we hope to be making even bigger waves in future. To address your questions:

I can’t say for certain what the limitations are for your simulation bounds, but I will say that you are in great hands having a 3090 card and you will be able to handle simulations below 100 million voxels^3 with ease.

We are aware of the limitations of our Colored Smoke simulation and I like that idea of being able to change the color of the emitter based on some multi-color input. I’ll relay the idea to our devs!

One thing that I have heard is that other software allow a “color” or “scattering” pass in their VDB’s to emulate the colors you see in the engine you create it in, but we do not have that ability at the moment. I personally try to composite my creations in After Effects or I will import them as planes into blender. I would advocate that any limitation that blender has is significantly outweighed by the speed of rendering that we offer :smiley:

I am not a dev, but the main difference between 1.0 and 2.0 will be the engine that it runs on. 1.0 Embergen will still utilize the static bounding box to control the simulations, where 2.0 will be running on our sparse engine, meaning that the voxel bounding box is calculated dynamically, allowing for a huge increase in fidelity. But details beyond that remain unclear.

I hope this helps and feel free to reach out to us here or in our discord!