JangaFX’s GeoGen
GeoGen is a terrain generator from JangaFX, the scrappy team that brought us EmberGen. Like EmberGen, GeoGen is focused on real-time, GPU-accelerated performance. So to understand this tool, you just need to imagine Gaea, Terragen or World Builder — but a lot faster.
The workflow for terrain generation in GeoGen is similar to those other packages: Procedural nodes or images drive heightmaps to give you the overall structure of your terrain. Then you begin to add detail in both geometry and color based on user-controlled gradients, elevations and slopes. You also have additional atmospheric effects, such as fog, clouds and water.
Those who are familiar with EmberGen will find the interface almost identical, so moving from Ember to Geo would feel nearly seamless. It then becomes a matter of learning what the GeoGen-specific nodes are. You can set up your base node with an input to form the initial terrain, compounded with a profile curve that dictates the slope and structure of the terrain. It can be a custom curve, or you can choose types of terrain, including cliff, crevasse, island, mountain ridge — and then customize those to taste. After that it’s all about making the scene more complex with masks, filters, height modifiers, erosion and colors. Again, this is very similar to other terrain workflows — the difference is that the results in GeoGen are real time.
One feature in particular that I was wowed by is a gradient color picker. Normally, for a gradient you place a marker on the gradient color swatch and then choose a color for that marker. But GeoGen’s gradient picker allows you to have a reference image, such as a mountain range you are trying to emulate. Then you can click and drag across the range of colors — and the variations in the image will get transposed into the gradient swatch.
Like JangaFX, the package includes a bunch of presets to get you well on your way. You can either use them as a starting point or as a great learning tool to deconstruct how the node tree is built. Clicking on the output icon of a node will show you the state of the terrain at that point in the node tree, so you can easily tell how that node is contributing.
The renderer is proprietary to GeoGen and includes a raymarcher, a lightmap and a path tracer, so you have options for your output quality. However, I would be more inclined to export the terrain, color and utility maps to geo (currently OBJ or FBX) and textures (you can export up to 16K) and then bring them into my favorite DCC or Unreal. Or even export to heightmaps to repurpose in other software. But when you are devving the terrain out, nothing beats real-time — and that’s what GeoGen is all about.
GeoGen is currently in alpha mode, but it has been rigorously tested by the JangaFX user base for at least six months. And frankly, I haven’t had any problems with it crashing — although I haven’t been pushing it at production-level tasks either. You can currently download a trial of the alpha or purchase it for $150 (and a $75/year maintenance fee after that). Or you can go whole hog and get the JangaFX Suite, which will also get you EmberGen and access to the LiquiGen pre-alpha (see the other review here) for $400 (and $190/year after). Frankly, with all that these tools do — this is a steal.
jangafx.com/software/geogen
Price: $150
JangaFX’s LiquiGen
Also from JangaFX, but still in pre-alpha, is LiquiGen, which is exactly what it sounds like — a liquid simulation generator. And true to JangaFX form, it’s real-time — or at the very least near real-time, because you can easily take down your GPU if you throw enough particles at it.
Even in its early alpha state, LiquiGen is really powerful and promising. Like its sister apps, LiquidGen is node based, and it’s a matter of importing or creating any geo as part of the scene, getting your liquid emitter emitting and watching it go. Then you start to dial in the parameters — as it is simulating. This is definitely leaps and bounds more efficient than the days when I was simulating in RealFlow, where I would sim, leave for a while, come back to check out the result, tweak something else, start the sim, etc. — literally rinse and repeat until you have something that is hopefully good. Having your liquid run this fast is definitely changing the game.
Artists familiar with simulating fluids will be familiar with the terminology within LiquiGen, so the learning curve is pretty darn shallow (yeah, water puns all day long). But even if you are a beginner to liquids, you are provided with a bunch of presets to get you started, and because it’s real-time you can immediately see results from the parameters you are experimenting with.
You can choose between raymarcher or path tracer for your viewport renderer. Raymarcher is faster, but path tracer will give you a pretty decent representation of the water with reflections and refractions (which, as you know, is important to liquids). Like GeoGen, I would probably be exporting the fluids to an Alembic sequence to render elsewhere — but much of the Gen community consists of game developers, so they might render out to flipbooks or image sequences that can be brought into a game engine. They have it on the road map to include additional AOVs directly out of LiquiGen.
As mentioned above, LiquiGen is currently in pre-alpha and there are plenty of features that are not yet implemented but on the development road map. But if you want to start to wrap your head around it and can deal with the limitations and instability of an alpha product, then you can get in on the action. You can upgrade your other Gen products to the full suite, and you can opt into the alpha and start making some water simulations. I will definitely be looping back around for a deeper, richer review when LiquiGen hits 1.0.
tyFlow
For those of you not in the know or outside of the 3ds Max user group, tyFlow has changed the way people use Max for VFX work (as well as for plenty of other creative uses). Creator Tyson Ibele achieved this by using Max’s internal Particle Flow methodology, completely rewriting it from the ground up to support multithreading, and the functionality just kept growing from there.
In tyFlow 1.1, Tyson dug back in to solve a deep-seated problem in Boolean and CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) operations integral to destruction and fracture workflows: buggy, slow, limited inputs and degenerate results. Again, from the ground up, inspired by recent white papers (but cognizant of their limitations), PRISM (Polygon Refinement via InterSecting Meshes) was born.
The first thing you need to know is that PRISM is fast. It takes advantage of your CUDA GPU for its mesh operations. So the beefier your NVIDIA card is, the faster it’ll run. But if your GPU is unsupported, PRISM will also run efficiently across multiple CPU cores with dynamic load balancing when a lot of operations are happening.
Next, it handles the degenerate Boolean results effectively and deals with self-intersecting meshes and coincident faces. This has been an issue for a long time with destruction and fracturing — the meshes being clean and nothing intersecting. Not an excuse for sloppy modeling, mind you, but PRISM can forgive some.
PRISM can not only handle a multitude of Boolean inputs, but a number of various methods — by painting, the bounds of the object, the edges of the object, bitmap-driven or Voronoi — each of these were separate operators in an earlier tyFlow version, but they have now been integrated into the new PRISM tyBoolean and tyMultifracture modifiers, as well as the Multifracture particle operator.
Despite the extensive reworking, PRISM doesn’t change the way that you use tyFlow. To test this out I went back to an older destruction tutorial and stepped through it but used the new ways rather than the legacy methods, and there was very little I had to change. I got better results faster and I could get more details. And I didn’t have to learn new workflows. This means that you can get complex results faster, with fewer crashes and a more streamlined workflow.
However, tyFLow 1.1 isn’t just about PRISM. Since the release back in January, there have been an uncountable number of additions and bug fixes across numerous operators and modifiers, including updates to the Terrain, VDB and Alembic importing and exporting. There is a cool pathfinding node that finds the shortest distance from a particle position to a destination across the surface of a mesh, which can be extrapolated into splines and then be modified with tySplines.
I am not overstating things by how much I believe tyFlow has changed the way artists work with 3ds Max — and by the look of it, Tyson doesn’t appear to be slowing down. You can look at the Trello of the road map to see what he has in store and how much he listens to the user base.
pro.tyflow.com
Price: tyFlow: free; tyFlow Pro (node-locked): $495; tyFlow Pro (floating): $645
Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose many credits include I’m a Virgo, For All Mankind and Black Panther. He can be reached at teaspoonvfx.com.
