Case study
EmberGen Test
I started playing around with EmberGen with Karma XPU and did a quick test.
🔥 The first clip is an EmberGen sim that I brought into Houdini 20 and rendered with Karma XPU. I cranked the Density up 1000x in the shader, turned up the flame intensity and turned up the volume bounce light.
I really liked how Karma could light up the smoke with indirect light. The smoke looks really smooth and 'mushroomy', which is my fault. I was really looking for any sort of Disturbance control that could break up the edges. I'm not sure if this is something that they plan on adding later to EmberGen or if I should have played around with Density Masking and Turbulence to get a similar effect.
🔥 The second clip is a render of the same sim right out of EmberGen. It's crazy how this only took a couple of minutes. The XPU render took close to 20 hours, but I did crank the samples quite high (1024).
🔥 The last clip is the same sim, but trying to match the color gradient that EmberGen had. This was a much shorter render, just overnight (maybe 12 hours).
After playing with it for a bit, I would say that if you're comfortable simming in Houdini, you should stick with Axiom. It's really integrated well into Houdini and uses a lot of the Houdini workflow that you're use to. It also has the advantage that it's sparse as well as being on the GPU.
If you're not using Houdini, then I think EmberGen really deserves a look. It's very fun to use with a clean UI. It's fairly intuitive to use and it has good documentation. Redefine FX has a good course and some free lessons on how to use it.
It's also very fun to have your sims in real-time. Being able to quickly iterate is critical in eventually getting something you like, so EmberGen scores big here. I think EmberGen could fit perfectly for a lot of projects (making pyro for Unreal, secondary elements for a comp).
I did struggle with trying to make the sim not look too 'noisey'. I don't think I was totally successful getting the sim to behave like fire instead of being affected by noise. I also had trouble getting small details like wisps of smoke and just breaking up the leading edge of density. I need to practice more, but if anyone has any tips to get to most out of it, please let me know.
I'm very much looking forward to Janga's LiquidGen. They've shown previews of it on their YouTube page.
