Embergen, by JangaFX is a real-time fluid simulation software for creating fire and smoke effects for game and film projects. You can create and modify fluid simulations in real-time on consumer class graphics hardware and export your results in flipbook or image sequence formats for use in games, or export in OpenVDB format, an open standard Blender 2.83 just acquired the ability to import.
Details from the 0.5.3 release:
- Improved the fidelity and simulations of ALL presets and added 9 new presets.
- Pressure solver improvements:
- Improve base pressure solver accuracy and performance.
- Slight memory reduction.
- Expose more pressure solver controls.
- Increasing the parameters will improve the accuracy and produce better motion, but are more expensive.
- Volume masking/Simulation post-processing (only visual, not affecting the simulation): Motion blur, Sharpening, Dilate, Stylized.
- Basic navigation gizmo in the lower left corner to show orientation.
- Fixed crashes and freezes when previewing some output modes.
- Fixed the Simulation upscaling parameters being incorrect when loading from a preset.
- Improved tooltips.
- Sixpoint and normals fixed for upscaling.
- Improved background color with transparency.
- General rendering improvements and speedup.
- Simulation looping:
- No longer cuts on the first loop wraparound.
- Fixed an off-by-one error where later loop iterations did not sync properly.
- Fixed parameters not animating correctly.
- Improved accuracy of turbulence advection.
- Made the ExportVDB node work similar to the ExportImage node. Certain widgets will “multicast” when multiple nodes are selected, e.g. timing controls and export masks.
- Displays tick in the timeline indicating which frames will be exported.
- Automatic frame timings when looping.
- Fixed colors and forces when using multiple emitters and shapes for colored smoke.
- Fixed a difference in lighting between the basic mode and combustion.
- UI Improvements: Informational text displayed when necessary per node, e.g. if the license or trial is expired.
- Disabled buttons now have a red border.
- Fixed bug preventing timeline key editing.
- Small visual tweaks to the timeline for user experience and consistency.
- Stop sliders from keeping focus after submitting.
- Tooltips no longer display when their respective UI element is occluded.
- Fix incorrect behavior for color picker widgets.
- The color picker will no longer lock up and become unresponsive.
- A bunch of smaller bug fixes.
- Miscellaneous Improvements: Lots of refactoring and delicious code cleanup.
Embergen has a fully functional 2 week trial available here as well as several free OpenVDB datasets to start with. You can learn more and see Embergen in action in the video below.