battlestarvfx.com

Hey guys.
I just had a great meeting here with Kiko about Bakudan and saw the new interface today (its still really rough though) along with some more speed tests of the external test renderer.

The most interesting thing to report though is the way that bakudan will display the CFD inside of Lightwave to give you pretty much real time performance no matter how complicated the CFD volume is or how big it is in terms of grid resolution.

This display method also opens up some interesting options where we may be able to export how its displayed to a PFX or MDD file, allowing even further control or conversion for rendering with HVs or HD instance but use the CFD solver for motion! Wow!

More details soon. Kiko wants to run some experiments for a day or two and then I hope to get some more "near reality" screen shots as to how the CFD volume is displayed in LW.
Our first goal right now is to get the CFD solver and the control inputs into Lightwave working with this display system hooked up and then port the code to each of the intended release versions. Once that is complete, we can begin testing that part of the plug-in and get it out to the closed beta testing group.

Great.. can't wait to test it.
You know what would be good...?
If the sprite mode worked better than LW's HV sprites..
Sometimes they get specular or even receive shadows making it look silly..
Intersecting sprites always piss me off.. grrrrrrrrrrrrr

(our goal is eventually to replace HVs completely, but thats a more long term thing - yet it is on our minds)

damn, sounds Awesome!

I know you guys are chomping at the bit for updates here and more information. I try to not apply too much pressure to Kiko as he is a smart kat but works at his own pace and has his mom to take care of (who is in her 80s), but our meeting on sunday was very productive and he told me to give him some time to do some experiments on the Lightwave interface portion of the plug-in and then call him sometime around friday. So one more day and I hope to be able to give you some more updates. I have seen the LW plug-in displaying the basic CFD volume grid and its VERY cool.

More soon.

KelKat