


And the meshing is very much based on the Naiad mesher. The fluid solver in Bifrost is definitely ported from Naiad. You might author in one environment but compute in another – in the cloud, for example.ĬGC: How similar is Bifrost to Naiad under the hood? And perhaps we’ll see a move over the years towards the separation of authoring and compute, so. But I guess the two worlds are proceduralism and interactivity.
#Bifrost vs realflow code
MN: I wouldn’t read too much into that: it was originally just a code name.
#Bifrost vs realflow free
If we were to get the technology in Naiad to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, doing it in the Autodesk family – and particularly Maya – was a free ride.ĬGC: The name Bifrost suggests a bridge between two worlds. A lot of people were still using RealFlow a lot of people were using Houdini. Marcus Nordenstam: It was becoming obvious that getting Naiad into the hands of a larger market was going to be an uphill battle. Why did you decide to sell to Autodesk when you did?
#Bifrost vs realflow software
In the interview below, we talked to former Exotic Matter CEO Marcus Nordenstam, now product manager at Autodesk, about how Bifrost compares to Naiad architecturally, and how having a true production-ready fluid simulator built into Maya will change artists’ working lives.Īs a publicly traded company, Autodesk has a legal obligation not to make definite statements about future software releases that fall outside the current financial quarter – an issue around which the conversation had to steer – but we feel it provides a glimpse of what a next-generation simulation workflow might look like.ĬG Channel: Let’s start with a little history. Although still very much a work in progress, it already enables artists to render large simulations without meshing them first – and in future versions, may lead to new workflows in which the authoring and computation of a simulation are completely decoupled, enabling studios to compute simulations in the cloud, or on specific games hardware.īuilding a next-generation simulation workflow Taking its name from the bridge that linked the world to the realm of the gods in Norse mythology, Bifrost represents a bridge to the future in other ways. But whereas Naiad was definitely a TD’s tool, Bifrost aims to make setting up simulations a point-and-click process. Like Naiad, the standalone fluid simulator created by Exotic Matter, which Autodesk acquired in 2012, Bifrost uses a next-generation hybrid fluid solver. One of the headline features of Autodesk’s 2015 animation product releases was Bifrost: the brand-new fluid simulation system built into Maya 2015.

Its co-author, Marcus Nordenstam – now product manager at Autodesk – tells us how it will stir up FX artists’ workflows. Standalone fluid simulator Naiad has been reborn as Maya 2015’s new Bifrost simulation system.
