Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

We were talking about this earlier. I'm biased towards Houdini's Pyro because I'm more of a Houdini kind of person. I've used the Pyro solver and the whole Pyro tech a bit more robustly, and it is capable of really powerful things. One of the perks of Houdini being node-based is that even the solver, the calculation that happens to calculate how a smoke sim should operate, is all totally exposed. So I'm able to go into essentially the code, not quite code, but the node that builds up this entire solver. I can manually tweak the parameters. In Fume, I can't quite, but it is kind of like you pick your tools for it. I know Fume does produce results a lot faster and a lot easier than Pyro. Pyro can be a bit, you've got to work at it, it's a bit like clay. But I mean, Fume is perfectly valid. I think Jake Ganey, our assistant creative director, I think his title is...

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Is that his new title? He was assistant art director the last time I talked to him.

Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

Oh, I think that was it, yeah. He uses Fume quite a bit. He doesn't really use Pyro. And some of the stuff that he produces just with Fume is crazy.

Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

Yeah, when I talked earlier about different artists bringing different methods, we learn every time that we do this. Jake Ganey is one of these people who's done that. He takes sims from FumeFX, brings them into Houdini, and then has them as separate node chains. So at the moment, we're just going down one linear path. But he would have quite a few different aspects in and then build up and layer up the simulation and the VDB grids. It's a really versatile method. That's why Fume is great, but Fume with Houdini is really super powerful and it does everything that we need it to do.

Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

But yeah, we've got another artist, Jake Dunlop. He uses particle sims as his base. So we all have different methods.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, that's one of the neat things. We see this quite often through different departments in CIG. It's a push towards using the tools that our artists are most effective with. If you're more effective with this, then use that. If you're more effective with that, then use that. And we have an entire tools team that works to build all of the connectors and the translators that are necessary to allow that to happen.

Jacob · VFX Technical Artist

Yeah, and they all give good results, but different results as well. So if you want more of this kind of look, we're going to have to use a Fume simulation. If we want another particular look, we have to use a particle simulation, and then we have to start maybe thinking about tools that would help aid the process. So if an artist who uses Fume can't quite get the result that he wants with what the particle workflow produces, we've started this where, again, Ollie and I start to come in: what tools do they need to make this easier, so any artist can come and use this so it's not exclusive to this one artist?