Realflow Learning Edition - $99

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi guys,

Thought some of you may find this interesting:
http://www.realflow.com/education/

A non-commercial almost fully functional version of Realflow for $99, which is just a fraction of its normal cost.
It also comes with the Renderkit (plug-in for fluid rendering).

Generally a great thing to see companies sell these almost fully functional non commercial versions of their software for such low prices.
Perfectly fine for hobbyists and students.

[Dune]

Thanks, Martin. Interesting.

[cyphyr]

Sweet and it looks to be watermark free (as it should be for a paid app!)

[Tangled-Universe]

Sweet and it looks to be watermark free (as it should be for a paid app!)

Yes that's also how Houdini Apprentice HD works, the free version has a watermark and the HD version doesn't

I'm wondering though how you'd put a watermark into a particle simulation

[TheBadger]

THANK YOU!!!! I wanted to learn this but could not justify the cost of buying it to my self. Now I can

[Dune]

It's probably of much use for animations, not very interesting for stills I suppose?

[Tangled-Universe]

No absolutely not I think. I think it's also very interesting for stills.

Imagine you simulate a waterfall and render that inside max/maya with a TG generated HDRI and motionblur.
You can do the same for a river with rapids.
Or crashing waves.
Rain.
Snowflakes/snow.
You can even do similar things as Hannes did once, like flocking birds or swarms.

There's a lot you can do and Realflow is pretty easy to get started with.
Hardest part is the workflow between the 3 apps.

[TheBadger]

T-U,

Is this the version you have no? Or do you use something else? When you say easy, what do you mean? Because I know what you mean about pipelines... Its like software makers hate each other or something, so that they dont want one soft beeing used with another at all.  lol, Aoutodesk does not even want you using two of their own softs together  

[rcallicotte]

This I'd love to see...but in Modo. 

No absolutely not I think. I think it's also very interesting for stills.

Imagine you simulate a waterfall and render that inside max/maya with a TG generated HDRI and motionblur.
You can do the same for a river with rapids.
Or crashing waves.
Rain.
Snowflakes/snow.
You can even do similar things as Hannes did once, like flocking birds or swarms.

There's a lot you can do and Realflow is pretty easy to get started with.
Hardest part is the workflow between the 3 apps.

[Tangled-Universe]

T-U,

Is this the version you have no? Or do you use something else? When you say easy, what do you mean? Because I know what you mean about pipelines... Its like software makers hate each other or something, so that they dont want one soft beeing used with another at all.  lol, Aoutodesk does not even want you using two of their own softs together  

Easy means that you can definitely do it and better than me...

[TheBadger]

Sounds great! But better than you?  lol Well for the fun of it, I accept your challenge 

[Tangled-Universe]

Sounds great! But better than you?  lol Well for the fun of it, I accept your challenge 

Seriously, my experience with other 3D apps is really minimal, kind of reciprocal to the experience with TG2.

[TheBadger]

Hi Martin

Do you have a list of resources you can share; galleries, tuts, discussion, innovations, so on. Other than the product forum I mean.

Also. Have you run into any fire stuff for realflow? I found this on a facebook from google:
https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=213245663064

I expect if it can do fire it can do clouds, gas, smoke, heat waves?

Do you have any opinion on realflow vs fumeFX? The later is really pricey. I wonder if I could do much of the same with realflow?

At 99$ you almost cant loose. But a 100 dollars is still a 100 dollars to me.

[Tangled-Universe]

These Fusion CIS guys are damn smart with Realflow, so unless you don't buy their stuff it will take some years and extensive knowledge/experience to achieve these results.
In that regard FumeFX is much more suitable for fire and smoke, hence its name.
FumeFX offers great simulations for (pyroclastic) clouds and with wavelet functions you can obtain great details in relatively medium res sims.
Shock waves shouldn't be too hard to do either. Guess you can also do that with realflow with a bit of play, but I think naturally FumeFX lends itself better to this purpose.

However, there's one package which has it ALL and is also for $99 available with only a couple of restrictions: Houdini (Apprentice HD).
I'm strongly thinking of buying that and lock myself up with that for a year or two.
With Houdini you can do tree modeling, water, clouds, smoke etc. etc. and also offers nice geometry through displacements which can be rendered efficiently and superfast with Mantra PBR.
You can even write shaders yourself for this renderer in a language similar to Renderman shader language which even I do understand a bit with limited foreknowledge.
Also, a lot of its functionality also uses a node-based system, so the paradigm should be familiar, although Houdini really is a big step up.

Houdini Apprentice HD's restrictions are that you can't use 3rd party rendering, if you were to have Renderman, VRay or the like, which I don't.
Nor has it FBX export. Furthermore you can render animations at 1080p max and all of your project files are saved in the non-commercial file formats which can't be opened in the commercial versions of the software.
However, you can open commercial projects, but they will be saved in non-commercial format.
The amount of documentation is increasing and on Vimeo there's a great channel named "Go Procedural" where a guy from SideFX (with a very annoying voice/accent haha lol) gives great tutorials with good explanations.

Anyway, if I ever need a true HDR probe or backdrop then I can always revert back to a bit of TG.

[freelancah]

Also this site has a lot of links to houdini tutorials..  http://www.papicrunch.net/GC-houdb/ (Sorry about offtopic)