Hi,

 I wanted to ask how to force maya to do fluid simulation on the GPU,

Does a plug-in for commercial use exist?

Do you have any suggestions to where i should start off?

Thank you for your time!

>>  I wanted to ask how to force maya to do fluid simulation on the GPU,

you dont!

Hey Joojaa,

Maybe i asked it the wrong way,

Ive seen online and i heard from people that you can actually do a maya based fluid simulation using your GPU

here are some links

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch38.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NW4iM0iQ6A

http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:271956/FULLTEXT01

so ill rephrase my question :

I want to make my fluid simulation faster and i believe that there is a method to use your GPU to do all the math,

does anybody know anything about that?Can i have a pointer or two as to where i should start reading or what needs to

be done?

Yes you BELIEVE that there is a method using GPUs. You should have a closer look onto your example links. No one of them shows gpu accellerated fluid dynamics using maya. The nvidia book shows algorithms how to solve fluid simulations mathematically, the pdf is an example how to EXPORT fluid data and use it in a standalone render application. And finally the youtube guy shows fluids driven by PARTICLES and he mentioned it as "hardware-accellerated" but the option that he is using his graphics hardware finally lacks in the opportunity to bypass mayas fluid calculation. Theres simply no way to do this internally in a kind that maya does handover fluid container information to your GPU algorithms and then finally receives the precomputed data. If you want to do this inside maya you are forced to do this using the provided api library and those classes simply do not include a method to involve gpus or even allow an alternate and maya independent processing source, at least until maya 2011 theres no such an option.

>> that there is a method to use your GPU to do all the math,

Yes but not in maya. GPU programming is hard, its expensive and it locks your users down to certain hardware. Most vendors do not like to do this. Its much harder to program, and has a smaller audience that could use the software, more cost less return. And finally only about 2% of potential customers have very good hardware to speak of, tough mayay users maybe are at 50%. It also makes running maya on render servers terribly hard.

Its not as if the gpu runs the same code as the cpu, if it did then it would be all spiffy. But it does not, you cant just take a program designed to cpus and say use gpu. It dot work that way.

Also you cant just solve a problem by throwing money at it. Similarly you cant just solve your speed issues with buying more expensive hardware. Rich would wish this was true but its not.

>> those classes simply do not include a method to involve gpus or even allow an alternate
>> and maya independent processing source

no but that does not men one could not do this, its just that there would be a big bottleneck just there in the api. Anyway its not much use to make the maya fluid container hardware accelerated. Basically you would start form scratch and write it ALL on your own, including the mentalray and maya software implementations of it. But yes that's like 5 times to work to develop it on one system alone and youd miss all the nice rendering quality stuff that maya allready has.


There just no market for this the way i see it, not atleast the required 300-3000 manhours of work. besides cpus are more flexible so once you want to extend the code then the work done for the gpu is a bit problematic.

somebody had his hands on it:
http://www.foliativ.net/book/index.php?post/2011/03/04/Cuda-Fluid-Solver-Plugin

zFluid - Maya fluid simulation using the GPU:
http://cid-a6597afda81373ba.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A6597AFDA81373BA!1094.entry

I'm not sure where his creative crash link for that went, but this plug-in does require compiling, so you need to have the developer tools at hand.


this same programmer has also written a GPU smoke simulator:
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/dynamics/c/zsmoke 


Nvidia also has tools available if you're a registered Nvidia developer for using the GPU in Maya:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/apex.html