Hey guys, so based on this description:

“
fluid is supported. Due to some limitations of Maya API, it's currently only available on Maya 2014 and up. We should be able to have the same support on Maya 2013.5 (extension) too. However, Maya 2013 and older would require a completely different implementation, so there's no support in the older versions yet.

One important thing to note is that Houdini volumes are individual grids, whereas Maya fluidShape contains a fixed number of grids. And currently, multiple Houdini volumes can be mapped to each Maya fluidShape by specific volume names, which are connected to the their respective grids on the Maya fluidShape. The mapped volumes are: density, temperature, fuel, velocity
”

it looks like, as long as my volume primitive is named density, it would render in maya 2015 right (I have a fluidShape node). This volume is a VDB volume though. should it be converted to a standard volume first?

thanks!

Yup, VDB should be imported as a “dense” volume in Maya.

Just to clarify, the asset doesn't have to manually convert the VDB volume to a normal volume. The Maya plugin will do the conversion. So you should be able to simply output VDB volumes from the asset.

Been experimenting some more with volumes using HE (for Linux/Maya2014)…

A few observations

when visualizing the volume in maya, it's always necessary to turn on Lighting>self shadow on the fluidShape node… shouldn't this be defaulted to ON? It makes a huge difference in the quality.

Maybe also Display>Boundry Draw (on fluidShape) could be defaulted to OFF - just to be a bit more on par with what we see in Houdini.

I was just playing around with viewport 2.0 (turned ON) and noticed a huge speed increase when orbiting the camera around volumes, only problem is a lot of the interactive params I have in my OTL (density mult, etc) stop working until I set the viewport back to default.

Also, I don't know if it is a bug, but I notice a lot of times I 'll need to set Shading>Transparency (fluidShape) to R .001, G 0, B 0 in order to see the volume closer to how it appears in Houdini.

Maybe it is my volume example, but setting Display>Slices Per Voxel to 1 (on fluidShape) yields a better volume viz result and speeds the viewport interactivity at least 2x.

Any way in maya to work with volumes and lights interactively rather that using the light controls in the fluidShape?

Maybe some of these things have been resolved in newer versions of Maya.

Thanks for the feedback!

robochimp
when visualizing the volume in maya, it's always necessary to turn on Lighting>self shadow on the fluidShape node… shouldn't this be defaulted to ON? It makes a huge difference in the quality.

Maybe also Display>Boundry Draw (on fluidShape) could be defaulted to OFF - just to be a bit more on par with what we see in Houdini.

Hm, I see what you mean, but I think these are more of a user preference. Currently, I'm just using Maya's default. Maybe the real problem is that if you change the fluidShape's attributes, you'd lose the settings next time you do a sync. :?

robochimp
I was just playing around with viewport 2.0 (turned ON) and noticed a huge speed increase when orbiting the camera around volumes, only problem is a lot of the interactive params I have in my OTL (density mult, etc) stop working until I set the viewport back to default.

This seems to be a Maya bug. I was able to reproduce this problem with Maya's own caching (in Maya 2015). First, I cached two different fluids. Then, I attached and blend the two caches to the same fluid. Then, I change the input weights, and I expect the viewport to update interactively. The blended fluid updates interactively in the legacy viewport, but not in viewport 2.0. This setup is similar to how the Engine plugin outputs fluid/volumes.

robochimp
Also, I don't know if it is a bug, but I notice a lot of times I 'll need to set Shading>Transparency (fluidShape) to R: .001, G: 0, B: 0 in order to see the volume closer to how it appears in Houdini.

The two look fairly similar for me in my simple tests. Changing it to 0.001 actually make Maya's look really different. Maybe this depends on the actual volume (scale and density)?

robochimp
Any way in maya to work with volumes and lights interactively rather that using the light controls in the fluidShape?

Hm, it doesn't look like this is possible in Maya…?

Thanks for the feedback, Andrew…

>The two look fairly similar for me in my simple tests. Changing it to 0.001 actually make >Maya's look really different. Maybe this depends on the actual volume (scale and density)?

it's then most likely a object scale issue, I'd assume if my object was much smaller, the density would be much greater (less need to dial up the visualization of it in the fluidShape)