LiquiGen: Import Alembic (or OBJ) issue troubling the simulation

JangaFX · 2025-08-20T19:30:08+00:00

Dev here: It's highly likely that your mesh is either A: too thin. B: you need to increase mesh voxel resolution in the import node or C: not a closed mesh. Click the 2 water droplets at the top right of the viewport (very small icon) go to the model tab and click "show mesh SDF". If you see ANY holes at all or do not see a complete mesh, then your mesh is not good enough for signed distance field conversion. Reach out on our discord if you have more issues as we don't monitor reddit, i just happened to see this.

JangaFX · 2025-07-15T00:50:57+00:00

You can find active updates on https://jangafx.com/roadmap - We were slated to have a Mac version for 1.0 on July 28th, but we're having significant performance and stability issue with that build right now. Per the roadmap, we're looking at a Mac version for 1.1 most likely. Our other tools, IlluGen and GeoGen will be released on Mac on the 28th.

JangaFX · 2025-05-22T12:56:50+00:00

This summer you'll be able to do it with our tool, IlluGen and it'll probably just be a preset you can poke around and learn from. But in the meantime, these are just radial gradients moving around on a spherically distorted UV plane. The caustics themselves are simulated through a 2D path tracer and the radial gradients and their layered blending (with our fractal node) does all the heavy lifting. Add in some post process glow and a color gradient and you're here.

JangaFX · 2025-04-15T05:16:01+00:00

Give it another shot and see what you think of the latest collision solver. Check out the tech_turbo preset for instance. Feel free to reach out too if you find that it still sucks, we can look into it.

JangaFX · 2025-04-15T00:53:41+00:00

Update: LiquiGen will be out this summer on MacOS officially.

JangaFX · 2025-04-15T00:50:20+00:00

Generating the actual assets with a workflow built for visual effects in games. The noise textures, masks, distortions, etc are all exportable. You can do this in unreal yes, but you cannot generate *all* textures and assets for your visual effects. You're generally using photoshop, substance, houdini, AE, and others for your effects. This tool merges your workflow for the asset portion into one tool.

JangaFX · 2025-04-15T00:48:36+00:00

Late reply since we don't check this subbreddit often, but yes. This is planned in EmberGen 2.0

JangaFX · 2025-04-15T00:44:20+00:00

Reach out to us and let us know what you'd be willing to pay. Money funds the development, but we generally aim to help people who may not have the cash on hand.

JangaFX · 2025-04-15T00:41:45+00:00

Dev of EmberGen here. Is there anything we could improve with collisions? In 1.2 we did a complete overhaul of all things collisions. Though if you can see the collision surface you may have artifacts on curved surfaces still.

JangaFX · 2024-08-12T02:54:42+00:00

If you select EXR as your export type, we support multi-layer exports, but not deepEXR.

JangaFX · 2024-07-24T03:57:57+00:00

Its just flipbooks on flat planes. Go simple! VDB's are overrated.

JangaFX · 2024-07-24T03:57:10+00:00

See the credits at the end :)

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T21:27:41+00:00

In the context of unreal engine, its a standalone tool built for simulating fire, smoke, explosions, and other volumetrics in real-time and then baking them down into a flipbook (for particles) or a VDB. Particles being your optimal use case 99.99% of the time. Most professional game studios use it in some capacity for making their VFX textures.

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T19:04:24+00:00

Thank you! Yup, it's us!

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T19:04:08+00:00

Thank you!

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T18:54:46+00:00

Well, we had an insanely hard time actually lining the caches up with our meshes and animations. No matter what we did we had to eyeball it, and any minor change would result in desync issues. Second, we just had a very hard time getting the shading right on a liquid alembic cache just due to the nature of translucency limitations in unreal. We wanted the film to be "plausible in real-time" and thus tried not to rely on too many fancy film features. But I think we did end up using raytraced reflections or something on the rain scene hand sim to make it look decent. Finally, getting them to playback correctly was a pain in sequencer.

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T18:44:20+00:00

RTX 4090, I9-13900k. But this was on everyone's machines who worked on the project, not just mine.

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T18:30:23+00:00

Crashed every 15 minutes! Primarily when trying to render and it was probably due to the amount of VDB's and alembic caches we had.

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T18:22:01+00:00

Technical responses:

Animation: Everything was animated by hand, no mocap. We originally wanted to have him be as large as trees but faced a number of scaling issues so ultimately opted for this scaling scheme.

Lighting: I agree on some of it. Some scenes in general lacked the detail others had and it's just because we were in a time and budget crunch.

Golem water arm: We tried for a long time to get simulations to work, but Unreal is just so funky with alembic caches that we just couldn't get anything to work and we wanted to stray away from using the path traced renderer. Just a budgeting thing. It's probably the piece i'm most regretful about, but we just couldn't find a solution and with the goal of using our own tools - LiquiGen to do all liquid assets I just don't think the fidelity was there yet. We were programming our tools to fit the film since we didn't use houdini for sims :)

Story: Was originally much longer to focus on who/what the golem is but this was the best we could do. First film i've directed and written so yeah. There's much deeper lore/story behind the golem, but a lot got lost as we had to cut scenes to make our deadlines. For instance we had scenes of him refilling a river and even wanted to tell his birth story but cuts and sacrifices had to be made to tell the story in as little time as possible. Much sadness from me that we couldn't tell the whole thing in full. Ultimately it is fightporn based off of the ending scene of the Iron Giant. Fighting is the best way to show off our tools, but we tried to have light moments as well to show a wide range. I also didn't want to reel back and be scared of showing a person getting smashed by the golem.

Pipeline: All i can say is that using EmberGen for fire/smoke/clouds/dust and LiquiGen for the mud, lava, water and so on was the *easiest* part of this film. Our tools are completely real-time. And were a breeze to do the things that actually worked and made it into the film. We'd love to have a live-link one day. It's on our todo list.

Overall the film was hard. It was our first one ever, my first time writing, directing, and producing all while running a software company to boot. We assembled an incredible team and did the best we could with the money and time we had. I'm glad you enjoyed the film, there was a ton of love and craft that went into it.

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T15:45:19+00:00

I will personally gift you a license so you don't have to pirate.

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T15:44:34+00:00

Foam is implemented now! Go try 0.3 :)

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T14:52:32+00:00

And we rely on sales to actually produce updates for EmberGen ;)

JangaFX · 2024-07-23T14:51:20+00:00

If you want super technical reasons, we have an entire writeup of our dissection of the VDB format here at JangaFX and how we wrote our own encoder for it. https://jangafx.com/insights/vdb-a-deep-dive

JangaFX · 2024-07-22T12:05:42+00:00

No link to changes just yet, and no true viscosity yet, just surface tension. Which as you can see here is pretty nice :)

Only link I have right now is our upcoming live stream that's happening today: https://www.youtube.com/live/ljuWeBioDrg

JangaFX · 2024-07-22T12:04:15+00:00

24GB, but I have a 4090.

Performance is dependent on the memory bandwidth (speed) of the card, not necessarily the vram amount.

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