Bifr?st is a fluid dynamics engine for high-quality liquids in visual effects, combining the best of volumetric and particle solvers in one tool.


This course offers an overview of the Bifr?st implementation in Autodesk Maya. Using emitter, collider, accelerator, and liquid property nodes, Aaron F. Ross simulates a medium-scale liquid effect and stores it to disk as a cache. Rendering the surface at full quality requires generating an animated polygon mesh; for a convincing layered material, he shows how to extract Bifr?st channel data such as Vorticity and apply it in a shading network. The course concludes with a look at the Aero Solver for atmospheric effects.

Topics include:
* Understanding Bifr?st
* Analyzing the node structure
* Emitting from a polygon mesh
* Colliding with objects
* Pushing and damping fluid motion with accelerators
* Caching Bifr?st simulations
* Meshing liquid and exporting to Alembic
* Shading with the Bifr?st liquid material
* Designing mental ray materials
* Layering shaders with Bifr?st channel data
* Adding mist with an Aero simulation
* Texturing an Aero material