Wildlife fire demo

[adrian.licuriceanu]

Hello,

By opening the Particle System section in help I noticed a new image (starting with Unigine 2.11):

Is there a demo somewhere with this? Or maybe more information how something similar can be achieved? I am interested from performance point of view, to support large outdoor areas burning.

Regards,

Adrian L.

[morbid]

Hello Adrian,

We do not have such sample, this image was taken from one of ours side project. The good news is we will add it later, this definitely will be handy.

I can reach to our artists for an advice, but I'd like to know what exactly you're interested in. Is it only particle system configuration for a wildfire?

Thanks.

 

[vacious]

Hi Morbid,

I'm a colleague of Adrian's.  Our interest lies in the visuals - Particle system configuration for wildfire would be very interesting, but also anything regarding terrain texturing (eg. scorched ground appearing where the line of fire passes).

The image looks great - When approximately would this be made available?

Thanks!

[morbid]

We did a static burning location, approach was the following:

• Fire effect is a result of a number of particles combination, you'll need at least two: one for fire and one for the smoke
• Spawn rate and particle number was minimized for best performance, this will require experimentation with the exact scene and render settings
• Burnt ground was simulated with a decal

Convincing fire textures can be retrieved from fire footage.

Current plan is to do the same thing but in a more reusable way.

We need some time to estimate sample preparation time. Maybe will be on time with 2.12 release, but I'm not sure about this.

Thank you!

[adrian.licuriceanu]

Hi and thank you for the details,

Things that are of most interest is how to use particle systems (as you said for fire and smoke) on large areas but still keep framerate high. Think of km of ground with burning trees. 

So I guess, to save fill rate, we will need some sort of LOD for particles (e.g. merge particle systems with distance, create less particles but bigger?). So I wonder if Unigine offers some sort of particles LOD, or do we need to manually merge nodes, change parameters with distance?

We are also in the middle of transitioning to 2.11 and (new) things that caught my attention were:

Reduced update rate with distance: https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.11/objects/effects/particles/?rlang=cpp#optimize
Procedural Rendering: https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.11/objects/effects/particles/?rlang=cpp#procedural_rendering

First I guess can be used with distance, to reduce the update rate for distant particle systems. Should save CPU, but not necessarily frame rate. While second, maybe used to render particle systems simulations directly into sequence of textures and used some sort of billboard impostors with distance, showing sequence of animated textures instead of live particles?

Kind Regards,
Adrian L.

[morbid]

On 5/25/2020 at 4:09 PM, adrian.licuriceanu said:

So I guess, to save fill rate, we will need some sort of LOD for particles (e.g. merge particle systems with distance, create less particles but bigger?). So I wonder if Unigine offers some sort of particles LOD, or do we need to manually merge nodes, change parameters with distance?

Well, we don't have any LODs for particles out-of-the-box and by now such approach hasn't been used. This might work, however.

On 5/25/2020 at 4:09 PM, adrian.licuriceanu said:

We are also in the middle of transitioning to 2.11 and (new) things that caught my attention were

Reduced update rate is a good way to save some resources. It works with particles. Procedural rendering is a feature used mainly for rendering a particle to decal. I think there's no need in this.

We also finished a sample for 2.12. It has two types of wildfire stored into a single Node Reference. I wish I could send it to you right now, but it was built with an updated particles version, so it simply doesn't work with 2.11.

If you want to build a wildfire effect right now I suggest taking VFX add-on for assets and building a node with two particle systems (fire and smoke) with one decal for scorched earth. Our artist kept particle count for fire around 600 and 60 for the smoke.

2.12 wildfire sample WIP:

[adrian.licuriceanu]

Hello and thank you for the additional info.

When I was referring to procedural rendering I was thinking of a way to create impostors from particle systems, so instead of multiple billboards to show a particle system, I will just render few frames of them (the actual number of frames may be different depending on the particles setup) and then have a single impostor (billboard)/particle system playing the animated textures in a loop (kind of how old school fire was made when you couldn't afford even one particle system with a small fire). Is there a way to use the Impostor Creator for this?

Regards,

Adrian

[morbid]

Got the idea, thanks. The easiest way is to check your scene with regular particles with built-in optimizations. Usually it's more than enough.

On 5/28/2020 at 12:56 PM, adrian.licuriceanu said:

Is there a way to use the Impostor Creator for this?

Nope, that wouldn't work. Also, billboards do not support discrete animation with texture atlas out-of-the-box.

Thanks!

[adrian.licuriceanu]

Hi, ok. We will try normal optimizations first.

Any chance to get a hold of 2.12 beta and the demo?

[morbid]

We usually do release betas. However I have no official information on the 2.12 beta release date. But you always can ping me, if the beta will be out I'll send you a zipped scene.

Thanks!