emFluid 4.0 Released!
Eric Mootz has released a new version of his emFluid plug-in packing in some really cool new features. Eric sent me a description of the new features listed below.
emFluid4 has many improvements, but its main three/four new features are:
1) "Fluid Box Modes"
- manual (and multiple) fluid boxes.
- semi-automatic fluid boxes.
- fully automatic fluid box.
These new box modes basically allow you to do two things: either use an entirely automatic fluid box (for the user this is like not having any fluid box at all) or use one more manual fluid boxes. The big improvement is the ability to have as many fluid boxes as you wish, all using the same emFluid4 setup. This allows you to create complex and optimized fluid setups, e.g. a dozen burning tanks that move around, each with its own fluid box but only ONE set of parameters for all tanks. Surplus the fluid boxes can now *finally* be translated and scaled during the simulation. This was somewhat of an issue in the former versions.
Once you've enjoyed these new fluid box modes you will never want to go back to emFluid3 again, believe me !
2) "particle emission from internal 3D grids"
This is also a very important new feature. The new particle emitter emits particles from the internal fluid grids. This means that you get a very accurate (and prettier!) point cloud that looks much better than when simply using "normal" particles. This applies especially to fire, smoke and dust effects.
For this new feature some new emFluid4 particle types were introduced. The particles work together with the many new emFluid4 compounds. It is nevertheless of course still possible to use all the factory particle emitters along with the new emFluid4 particle emitter... or a combination of both.
3) The colorization of the flame and smoke particles has been greatly improved. This may seem like nothing more than a "nice to have", but it really is more than.
4(a) The emFluid4 setup is cleaner and more structured. At first sight one might think that it has become sort of a black box, not offering all the possibilities that the former emFluid2 and emFluid3 had to offer. That is incorrect ! ALL features are still there, they are simply nested one level below. It only takes one or two clicks to access all of the deeper functionality. Furthermore the compounds are designed in a way that you can simply explode the top level compounds to get their "pro" versions.
4(b) A new shader compound, based on the factory Particle_Volume shader, is included in the package.
This shader compound is designed to work together with the new emFluid4 particle types to render the flame and smoke. It may not be the ultimate render solution, but unfortunately that is the old "we need a decent volume shader" problem.
The shader compound is nevertheless a great help to "get started".