Matt Puchala has unveiled Axiom 3 for Houdini, a significant update to his volumetric fluid simulator. This latest version enables true sparse simulations, leveraging the GPU for rapid creation of captivating fire, smoke, and other pyrotechnic effects. Here’s a look at the key features and enhancements:
- 16-bit float fields, reducing memory footprint by half.
- Native Cuda support for Nvidia GPUs.
- Native Metal support on macOS for compatible devices.
- Native Arm support for Apple Silicon devices.
- Enhanced device and system memory usage, allowing the solver to utilize system memory in addition to GPU memory, crucial for large simulations. This is available when using Metal or Cuda.
- Larger neighbor tile cache sizes, resulting in faster performance for high-resolution simulations.
- Faster advection tracing.
- Improved project non-divergent, leading to greater stability and reduced artifacting.
- Overall solver performance improvements, ranging from 8% to 32% faster.
- Introduction of a 3rd disturbance and turbulence force.
- A disturbance seed parameter.
- Velocity drag functionality.
- Source shape transform handles.
- Source shapes can now inherit the orientation of their input.
- Plane type source shape, affecting anything below the plane.
- Source shapes can composite values when overlapping, enabling multiple influences with different forces.
- Updated to the latest NanoVDB version.
- Numerous small performance optimizations.
For further details about Axiom, explore the resources available from the developer.
