It might be worth figuring out what you want out of your choices. If you want a mature solution with well integrated production tested solvers, a rendering engine with inifnite licenses that is very highly tailored to scale massively with those simulations, you won't beat Houdini, no matter what rendering engine you tack on in another package.
Bifrost is an interesting departure from shoving things into the host and obscuring them for Autodesk, and it relies on relatively fresh or refreshed (but not untested or immature) libraries/frameworks, and it seems to be wanting to attempt a certain degree of generically approaching some problems, plus it's likely, when it will be out, to have some very good solvers. You are betting on months to a year or more away though (assuming it will even be available and viable in 2015 and patched in an eventual 2015.5). If you can wait for that long, wait, but if you want things sooner than that Houdini already has some great solvers, now has solid OpenVDB integration, and it's impossible to beat Mantra's scaling economically, and hard to beat it in other regards too. You only need one license of Houdini to begin with, and whether Naiad will blow it out of the water or not, it's unlikely to be a waste of money. On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 8:43 AM, Nick Angus <[email protected]> wrote: > Interesting, thanks Luc-Eric, it certainly looks very tied in to Maya > at this stage, although I am sure it is mostly a front end. Much in the > way Pixomondo integrated Naiad into Max, although deeper by the looks of > all the adaptive stuff. I imagine this level of integration would be a bit > trickier in Soft due to the older school nature of the IO.**** > > ** ** > > I must admit at this point I am pretty tempted to start looking into > Houdini, even just for fluids it could be good value, particularly with > Arnold integration. I don’t want to bash on Maya any more than necessary, > but if I am going to pick a partner for Soft to extend it into areas of > simulation that it struggles in I don’t think I will we going down the Maya > path…**** > > ** ** > > N**** > > ** ** > > *From:* [email protected] [mailto: > [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Luc-Eric Rousseau > *Sent:* Thursday, 15 August 2013 5:34 AM > > *To:* [email protected] > *Subject:* Re: Future of Naiad**** > > ** ** > > The siggraph user group meeting videos were posted. The one with bifrost > is called " Behind the curtain of RD"**** > > http://area.autodesk.com/Anaheim2013<https://connect.autodesk.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=bK-GRTdfLUiXi2n0RgTMcYqHgi28bNAIpkHDsL63ZwuMDdYAFdDXoVTVWcZLNdA1fgkawqvC1gw.&URL=http%3a%2f%2farea.autodesk.com%2fAnaheim2013> > **** > -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
