AI and CGI

We have to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in connection with CGI. I think usage of AI can affect a lot of things we can't imagine right now. What we are talking about here? For eg. there is subset of AI the so called Machine Learning (ML). It allows us to solve problems much quicker because the computers basically have steeper learning curve. Of course we have to provide large data sets to learn from. It seems more and more things can be optimized with AI or ML.

SideFX Procedural Dependency Graph

I think it is huge! 
I try to imagine how it will affect on the VFX intustry. I have to look closer, but I think it is a step toward a procedural pipeline and task management which is basically project-asset management from a bird's eye view.


All the details are here:
Side FX PDG

(updated on 2023-06-20 the link was broken so it turned out that PDG is now under Houdini which soft of a admission of that PDG is not software agnostic solution sadly)

Making of Adam - The VFX

You have certainly seen this short film:

What you may haven't seen this article about the making of the vfx stuff. Quite comprehensive article (I wish I could write things something like this):

Adam – VFX in the real-time short film

Digital Pyrotechnics at Industrial Light & Magic with Plume

I always think about how big studios deal with pyrotechnic (explosion, fire and smoke, usually). Do they use Maya fluid or FumeFx, Phoenix FD, Houdini Pyro FX, or Flowline, or something else (Blender)? And the answer is something else. Of course they probably use a lot of off-the-shelf stuff as it needed but since 2010 ILM has a proprietary solution called Plume. So there is an awesome presentation on youtube.

Maya Fluid - Losing color

If we use color method: dynamic grid to emit colored fluid (from a textured surface for eg.) the color of the fluid is getting grayer and grayer during the simulation. So we lose the emitted color sooner or later.

So what is going on in the background:
Since we use dynamic grid on color every voxel get an rgb value. It seems 0.4, 0.4, 0.4 is the default or something like that. We can check it like this: getFluidAttr -at color -xIndex 0 -yIndex 0 -zIndex 0. The simulation emits color with density but the remaining voxels (the empty ones: means no density) still has the default color. So during the simulation the emitted color is mixing with the default color and that means the fluid is turning to this default color gradually. There are two attributes in this context: Content Details / Color / Color Dissipation and Color Diffusion. Unfortunately the default value is 0 for both. So we can only increase the effect of loosing color.
Since there is no option to set no value on each voxel (it's not 0,0,0 bec. it means black) it is necessarily to lose the emitted color.
The only way to avoid gray color is to "overload" fluid color. We can emit color values like r:1 g: 5 b:2. Of course it is not an ultimate solution but works fine.